TransOcean 2: Rivals Interview

TransOcean is a business strategy simulation game where you slip into the role of an aspiring shipping company owner. You purchase freight vessels such as container ships, look for profitable contracts and ship the customer's freight all across the globe from port to port. Additionally to that, you will of course also decide on which ships you would like to upgrade and in which ports you want to build your subsidiaries. Finding and benefitting from low fuel prices and reasonable repair dock fees is naturally also part of your business.

In addition to the container ships of the first game, we have now added bulk ships that transport bulk solids and other general bulk freight as well as tankers that carry liquid goods. All three ship types have specific advantages and disadvantages so that you have to decide on which vessels are best for fulfilling your current goal – be it a story campaign goal or a competition mode goal where special victory conditions must be met in order to win the match. This competition mode is playable both in the brand new multiplayer mode against up to seven real life opponents or in the single-player mode against the new AI.

Furthermore, subsidiaries such as repair docks, refineries or wharfs now distribute profit shares to their owners whenever an opponent uses their services – or grant a discount when they are used by their owners themselves.Someone has to repair their ship in a subsidiary located in your region? You get a profit share. Someone wants to buy a ship in your wharf? You get a profit share!

That's a really nice feature supporting the feeling of a real rivalry, next to all the new actions of sabotage with which you can strike your enemies: freeze their bank accounts, bribe their subsidiaries or tip off the authorities to possible illegal goods on your rival’s ship - it's up to you!

We really cared very much about the user and press feedback of TransOcean: The Shipping Company. That is why the multiplayer and the new ship types were the first things we implemented in the second part. We worked on the best way to deliver a fun and engaging multiplayer mode where players can compete and compare their skills during a finite match-type gameplay. The feeling of having a winner after a set amount of time is quite fulfilling (at least for the winner ;) ).

An automation feature for single ships was also a big wish of the community. Since that is a pretty complex matter (How will the ship be repaired if the player did not select a repair harbour on the ship's route? Can the player select what freight should be transported? What if the ship doesn't have the necessary upgrades? What about contract deadlines?), we opted for a “keep it simple” approach that just deals with the very basic decisions.

As I have already mentioned above, the multiplayer and more ship types were the most frequently wished for features, so these were our starting points. We decided to use a real-time gameplay instead of turn-based one, since the player’s enjoyment of the game can very much depend on the playstyle of their opponents: if another player takes a lot of time to decide during a turn-based game for example, all other players will get frustrated while waiting. The real-time gameplay instead brought us a dynamic, fast-paced feeling where the fun (and the challenge) comes from making the right decisions under time pressure. Even being on the verge of bankruptcy becomes a thrilling experience under these circumstances! The most important question was: How will a winner be determined in the multiplayer mode? Basing a win solely on the possession of money would mean that a game would most likely be decided quite early on in the match. So instead we came up with victory points and victory conditions for the different rounds of a multiplayer-match: every time you build a subsidiary in round 1, you gain victory points. Whoever donates most of his ships in round 2, gains the most victory points, and so forth. Those victory conditions are different in every match. This means that you have to change your winning strategy for every new round and be as flexible as possible. That's pretty fun!

After that, we approached the single-player story campaign: Do we want to continue the storyline from part 1? What characters should reappear? What goals and challenges should the player be confronted with and how can these goals reflect the story? How do we want to give more advanced players an additional challenge in each campaign chapter, while still not overwhelming beginners? All those questions were a fun challenge in developing TransOcean 2, and we think we managed to solve them quite well.

We would have liked to add features to the players' headquarters where they can upgrade and unlock more actions like buying individual business shares of ports or spying on their opponents. And those “researched skills” should also expand the structure of the headquarter building itself. Unfortunately, the feasible and gameplay-wise logical content for the skill tree diminished more and more (or was integrated better in other places) while we decided for some and against other features.

We looked at a great variety of management games, current and classic ones such as Tropico, Anno, Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity or Civilization, and I personally drew some inspiration from my favourite games in this genre. The main difference with many other management or trading games is, however, that in those other games you yourself are the trader. Meaning, you buy goods and sell them yourself and you decide on the price. As a shipping company owner though, you are a service provider and your service is “transport”. You don't decide the wholesale and selling price of coffee for example. And if there is a sudden drop in the coffee harvest, this does not have any influence on your contract payments. So this quite common economic system of other games was of no use to us. We needed to develop something else.

Yes, but it is a big task implementing that and making it work with the rest of the whole game. We decided against Steam Workshop because, like I mentioned above, we had to weigh one feature against another very often and we opted for “real” in-game features that you can play with instead of modding.

My colleague Viktoria loves Assassin's Creed. She is a real achievement hunter and goes for platinum in every game. Marko on the other hand likes to spend hours and hours with Gran Turismo or Star Wars games. Games in a space setting are also popular such as Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen. I enjoy playing management games such as Age of Empires and Cities: Skylines.