This article was prepared during the development of the Corsairs Legacy pirate life simulator game by Ukrainian Mauris studio in order to popularize the marine theme in general and games about pirates in particular. You can follow the project news on our website, YouTube channel, and Telegram.

World of Sea Battle (WoSB) is a free-to-play online sailing ship battle game that the developer has been planning since high school. Today we will talk about the key moments of its development, which Sergey, who created World of Sea Battle alone, spoke about in his interview on April 12, 2021.

Sergey, the creator of World of Sea Battle, came up with the idea of ​​creating a game about sailing ships at school. Since childhood, the guy was fond of pirate-themed games, and as a teenager, in his spare time from lessons, he began to study programming languages. According to him, this did not affect his studies at school, but only became his interesting leisure. Already in the 9th grade, Sergey had the idea to create his own video game about naval battles.

The developer was inspired to create World of Sea Battle by such games as Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, PirateStorm, Seafight, and Sea Dogs: To Each His Own. When Sergey began to develop as a developer, he realized that there were no specific mechanics that would catch his attention in these games, but the guy was interested in the special atmosphere that united all these video games with each other. That, as a result, inspired him to create something similar. After analyzing similar products on the market, the author of World of Sea Battle realized that this niche is quite available and began to make plans for the future.

Despite the fact that the single-player genre is still reviving, Sergey wanted to create an MMO game specifically: “In my understanding, MMO projects allow you to create more interesting and deeper mechanics in the face of limited developer opportunities because single games require deeper development. Although the World of Sea Battle project started as a single-player game and later became an MMO game.”

According to the developer, in MMO games it is very common to stretch the gameplay to keep the player longer, but Sergey himself does not think that this should be strived for. In his opinion, it is much better to increase the variability of the game and its situationality.

It was with the introduction of new mechanics and new content that the creator of World of Sea Battle managed to double the number of players compared to the previous year. There was also a noticeable increase in the percentage of people who spent more than 10 hours in the game, more than 100 hours, and so on. The record was set by a player who spent 5200 hours in World of Sea Battle.

Now, on average, 500 people enter the game per day. There are usually about 150 players online in the evening, the record was 235 people.

New users in World of Sea Battle usually come through targeted advertising on YouTube and VK. However, it all depends on the audience settings. There are often cases when people come from advertising who turns out to be not at all interested in this topic and, having installed the game, simply leave.

World of Sea Battle

World of Sea Battle is a free game, so the developer uses a Free-to-play model with microtransactions in the game itself to monetize it. Users have the opportunity to purchase premium ships, premium subscriptions, and some other resource packs for fast leveling.

Thus, the money spent on advertising is fully covered. However, it is worth noting that advertising costs are not the only costs, but only 10% of the total spending budget.

World of Sea Battle for Sergey is something more than a hobby because he spends the lion's share of his time on it, but the game is not the main source of income for the developer. In parallel, Sergey is working on another project, namely the railway software.

The creator of the sailing ship simulator World of Sea Battle has plans to expand the audience by entering the foreign market. According to him, everything is technically ready for this, including the backend and the ability to translate the game. However, first, he wants to gain a sufficient audience in the CIS segment and then further enter the foreign market.

Naval Action

World of Sea Battle is often compared to Naval Action because the games are similar in the setting. However, World of Sea Battle has the advantage of being a fully-fledged open world. In Naval Action, battles take place in loadable locations.

Quite extensive technologies were used to develop World of Sea Battle. At the beginning of the game, the developer used Microsoft XNA technology, but now he has switched to SharpDX Toolkit. The back end is written in C #, part of the networking code in C++. Sergey also considered the Unity platform, but by that time a sufficient amount of work had already been done and it would be resource-intensive to change the platform at this stage.

According to Sergey, he is "obsessed with all kinds of optimization", and therefore created a game that weighs only 400 MB. Despite the fact that it is technically more difficult to create a mobile game of this format, it would take a developer the same amount of time and effort to create a similar project for mobile platforms.

Sergey likes to do both server-side and client-side development. But since he refers some things related to graphic content to client development, he tries to delegate this part of the work whenever possible. But as for working with code, in this case, it is much more difficult to delegate.

The World of Sea Battle team consists of two 3D artists, one administrator, and a person who manages the group and the user support center. Moreover, one intern-programmer works with them, whom Sergey himself teaches at the same time.

The team has a lot of interesting ideas in their plans that they would like to implement, but so far their first priority is the full release of the beta version of World of Sea Battle and its further expansion with content.

According to Sergei, his project has a fairly wide audience with different moods, because everyone could find something interesting for themselves. However, there is something that unites all these people — sailboats and sea battles.

We hope you found this article useful!

Learn more about the Corsairs Legacy - Historical Pirate RPG Simulator project and add it to your wishlist on the game's Steam page.