Welcome aboard for what is, by some margin, our largest Developer Journal to date. Before we get into any of it, we owe you an apology. This Journal represents two, possibly three months' worth of monthly updates rolled into one, and that is not the cadence we promised when we formalised the monthly schedule back in Journal 27.

There are reasons for the gap, and we'll come to them in a moment, but the short version is this: a great deal of work has been happening in the background that needed to be brought to a state we could actually show you, alongside the launch of the new Ahoy.gg website. We chose to wait to get the website right, and to fix up some of the issues we were dealing with in-game before showing you. Whether that was the right call is for you to judge, but we wanted to be straight with you about it before anything else.

The longer version is that the work itself simply expanded. The tech we've been wrestling with for sails, rigging and buoyancy reached the point where the team needed concentrated time to bring it home. The website backend rebuild touched almost every public-facing system we have, from accounts to entitlements to the way a Journal like this one is published. The performance capture and recording sessions in Paris, while carried out by only two members from the team, still demanded a lot of time-sensitive work to prepare scripts, arrange contracts, and book studio space for the recording days.

The team is committed to getting back to a regular monthly rhythm now that the new site is live, and we intend smaller, more focused Journals between now and the Sea Trials release.

What follows is the first look at gameplay, a deep dive into the technology underpinning sails, rigging and buoyancy, performance capture and 3D scanning, a new ship in the fleet, the announcement of the location you'll first sail in Sea Trials, an introduction to the new website, and a shipping update on Kickstarter physical rewards.

Let's get into it!

A First Look at Gameplay

For the first time, we're sharing footage of Ahoy gameplay. Real, in-engine, hands-on-the-controls footage of the work that has been happening on Sea Trials.

We want to set expectations clearly before you watch. This is work in progress in every sense of the phrase. Animations are unfinished, materials are placeholder in places, the environment around the ship is almost entirely missing, and you'll spot rough edges if you're looking for them. There are systems present that haven't been polished, and systems absent that will be there for release. None of what you see should be read as representative of the final experience.

Below is a video of Bumblebee at sea:

We've held off on showing gameplay for a long time, and that has been a deliberate choice. The team are perfectionists. Going forward, we're looking to share more regular snippets of gameplay like this as new systems are added and fleshed out. This is the first step in that direction. There will be more to come.

Sea Trials is currently targeted for July 2026, and the gap between what you see in this footage and what ships in July is where the bulk of the team's energy will be focused over the coming months. There are a huge number of elements we're focusing in on over the coming weeks, and we're excited to show you the quality step up in the next Journal.

• Bow waves / stern wakes. Missing from these videos. We recently moved over to our own proprietary ocean system, and much of the previous work on wakes/waves requires moving over.

• More ship interactions. We do have many interactions here which we're not showing. This will be the focus of the next Journal.

• A look at Îles des Saintes, the work ongoing with the tutorial storyline and performances, sound design, performance optimisations, and much more.

The Foundations: Sails, Rigging and Buoyancy

Most of what makes Ahoy feel the way it does sits underneath the waterline, both literally and figuratively. The sail behaviour, the rigging response, and the buoyancy of the hulls are systems we have been building from the ground up since the very beginning of the project. We often moved in one direction for a while, only to figure out it wasn't viable and pivot into another. This is why we've often talked about how hard it has been to define these systems from scratch. With the gameplay footage now public, it feels right to actually walk through what is happening inside it.

The temptation to oversell what the team has built is real, and we'd rather you reach your own conclusions when you sail one of these ships yourself. That said, I will say we have spent a long time looking at how other games in the genre approach these problems, and we have repeatedly come to the conclusion that we needed to go further than the existing approaches have allowed. Each time, that decision has cost us months of work, but we have looked at the results and felt it was worth it.

If a section of this Journal is going to be long, it is this one. If you are not interested in the technical detail, please feel free to skip ahead to the next section. For everyone else, here is what is happening on, in and underneath the ship.

Buoyancy

The simpler approach, used widely across the genre, is to define a small number of buoyancy points along the hull and apply force at each one based on how deep that point is beneath the water surface. It works well enough for many games, but it has a ceiling. The behaviour of the ship is always going to be a function of where you put your sample points and how you weight them, and the moment you ask the system to handle a wide range of hull shapes, sea states, or load conditions, the cracks start to show.

Our approach samples each hull across its actual three-dimensional shape, with buoyant force computed against the live water surface beneath it. That means the bow rises differently to the stern when a wave passes underneath, the ship rolls based on where the displaced water is acting, and the moment-to-moment behaviour is genuinely a result of the geometry of each ship's hull.

The practical consequence is that each ship in Ahoy will handle like itself. Bumblebee is a small, beamy sloop with a forgiving and easy motion. A larger frigate, when she eventually sails, will have a different fundamental response, not because we have hand-authored a different feel for her but because her hull is a different shape sitting in the same water.

The Ocean

In Ahoy, the surface you can see is the surface the hull is responding to. The peaks and troughs that sweep across the water are the same peaks and troughs that lift and drop the ship. When a swell rolls under a ship at anchor, you'll feel the response. So when two ships sit close to one another, they ride the same waves at slightly different times depending on where they sit in the swell, just as they would in real life.

This costs us some performance, and we've spent a meaningful amount of time making sure that cost is worth paying. It is also fair to say that we still have to spend time ensuring the performance cost is the minimum it can possibly be.

The result is an ocean that you can read and react to. The visual cues you pick up are the same cues the simulation is using, which makes the whole thing feel coherent in a way that is hard to put into words but immediately obvious when you sit at the helm.

Sails

The sail and rigging systems have been one of the longest-running technical challenges on the project, and the one we've talked around most often without going into detail. Part of the reason is that the work has been genuinely hard, and we didn't want to commit publicly to an approach until we were confident it would hold.

Each sail in Ahoy generates lift and drag based on its area, the angle of the wind across it, and the shape it currently holds. Crucially, the forces are resolved in three dimensions and applied at the point on the rig where the sail actually exists.

This sounds obvious, but doing it properly means the wind doesn't just push the ship forward. It pushes the rig sideways and upward, and the hull's response to that pushing is what produces the ship's actual motion through the water.

The result is that future sailing tactics, especially during combat, will make all the difference between one crew and another. Spilling wind from a sail to reduce heel. Backing the foresail to push the bow round when manoeuvring in tight water. Reducing sail in heavy weather not just for safety but because over-pressed canvas actually slows you down once the heel angle gets steep enough. The simulation will support these situations because it is built from the same first principles that the techniques themselves come from.

Rigging

Lines run between blocks, take load when the sail is set, and respond visually and physically to what is happening on the deck and aloft. A sheet that is hauled in pulls its sail to the angle the crew is asking for, against the resistance of the wind in the canvas. A sheet that is let fly releases that tension, and the sail spills its wind accordingly. Halyards, braces, backstays, and the dozens of other lines that thread through a rigged ship all participate in the simulation.

This is the area where we have most often found ourselves concluding that we needed to do something more involved. The historical truth of how a ship of this period actually works is bound up in the rigging, and abstracting it too aggressively with pre-made animations or sails that look rigid would cost us the very detail that makes the Age of Sail most interesting.

We've also gone to some lengths to make the rigging visible. They are actual lines, running to actual blocks, taking actual load. When the wind picks up and the sail strains against its sheets, the lines go taut in the way you would expect them to. When something carries away under load, you see what happened. We even influence where the sound of the sail flapping comes from directly from the simulation, allowing you to sense when the trim of your jib is incorrect.

Why It Matters

This is the foundation of Ahoy. Sea Trials exists in part to let us put these systems in front of players and let you tell us what works and what doesn't. The whole project is built on the premise that this layer needs to be correct, and the work to get it there has consumed a significant portion of our development time. We think it has been worth it.

The way ships fight in Arena will be a consequence of how they sail. The way trade routes work in the Open World will be a consequence of how long it takes to cross open water in a particular hull at a particular point of sail. We hope that the kinds of stories players will tell each other about close calls and lucky escapes will come out of moments where the simulation surprised them with something they couldn't have anticipated. None of those things should be designed directly. They have to grow out of these technical foundations naturally, and the foundations have to be solid enough to support them.

We'll be talking more about specific aspects of these systems in the months ahead. There is a great deal more to say about the wind itself, about how the ship's weight and trim are tracked, about rope physics and the small subsystems that handle individual things like flag movement or sail luff. Not to mention showing you the immersive experience of hauling and tying off the lines directly.

Performance Capture and 3D Scanning in Paris

Earlier in March, a few members of the team travelled to Paris for a performance capture and 3D scanning session covering four of our actors. This was a significant undertaking, and one we wanted to document properly. The video accompanying this Journal walks through the full process: the scanning rig, the capture stage at Unit Image, the technical setup, and a short preview of the recording sessions themselves.

We thought it was worth showing this stage of the pipeline because it is rarely seen and certainly not for indies like us. It is genuinely fascinating work in its own right. The level of detail captured is far beyond what would be possible otherwise, and every bit of it contributes to how the face reads in motion under different lighting conditions.

Each of the four actors stepped into a multi-camera rig and was photographed from every angle simultaneously, producing a dense point cloud that gets reconstructed into a high-fidelity 3D sculpt of their head. From that sculpt, our character art team builds the in-game representation, retaining the proportions and the small idiosyncrasies that make the face read as that particular person rather than as a generic head with the right hair.

The performance side of the trip was led by Maxime, our director of cinematography, and Delphine as our performance director. Across several days of recording, we captured scenes that will end up in Ahoy in various forms across Sea Trials and beyond.

We won't say too much about the content of those performances, as we'd rather let those moments land in context when you encounter them in game. What we will say is that the experience of seeing actors bring these characters to life on the capture stage was one of the genuine highlights of the year so far. There is a particular kind of magic to watching a performance you have written, cast, and prepared finally become its own thing.

Travelling to Paris for the session, rather than capturing locally, was a deliberate choice. The actors we worked with are based there, and the scanning facility at Scan Engine, Unit Image who we partnered with offered a level of fidelity and turnaround that we could not have achieved in-house.

The capture itself is only the first step. The data now feeds into a long pipeline of cleaning up, retargeting, and integration that the team will be working through over the coming weeks and months. Performance capture is one of those areas where the headline event, the actor in the suit on the stage, is a small fraction of the actual work. The longer process of bringing those performances into the engine, attaching them to the right characters, making sure they hold up under the lighting and the camera angles they will eventually be seen at, is what will occupy our time going forward.

There will be more performance capture work over the coming months, including additional sessions both in our own space and in partner facilities. We'll continue to share what we can.

Introducing La Salamandre

We're pleased to introduce the next addition to the Ahoy fleet: La Salamandre, a French galiote à bombes (a bomb vessel) of the late 18th century. Screenshots of her in-engine accompany this section. Like much of the Ahoy fleet, she is not yet sailing-ready, and there is still a meaningful amount of work to bring her to a playable state, but her hull and rig are in a place where we wanted to start showing her off.

Bomb vessels are an unusual kind of ship. They were built for a specific job, and that job shaped almost every decision in their construction. Whereas with a frigate built around her broadside, a bomb vessel is built around her mortars: heavy, short-barrelled artillery designed to lob explosive shells in a high arc, falling onto a target from above rather than striking it directly from the side.

The vessels carrying these mortars were therefore designed to be stable platforms first and foremost. Their hulls were reinforced to absorb the considerable recoil of a mortar firing vertically through the deck. Their rigs were arranged to keep the area forward of the foremast clear, where the mortars sat on rotating beds.

La Salamandre carries her main armament forward in the form of two heavy mortars, mounted on those reinforced beds. It also produces a particular kind of warfare: the bomb vessel sits offshore at long range, lobs shells in a high arc over intervening obstacles, and reduces the target a piece at a time. Coastal forts, harbours, anchored fleets sheltering under the guns of a battery: these were the targets bomb vessels were designed for.

Her introduction to the fleet fulfils the Bomb Vessel stretch goal from the Kickstarter campaign. As with all of the stretch goal ships, she will arrive in Ahoy beyond the initial Sea Trials and Arena releases. Bringing her into the project now allows our shipwright Loïc and the wider art team to begin the longer process of refining her details ahead of the time when she becomes playable.

It gives us a chance to start thinking about how a vessel like this fits into the Arena and Open World gameplay we have planned. Bomb vessels are a fundamentally different kind of fight to a regular engagement, and giving them their own role within the fleet is something we are looking forward to.

The historical Salamandre had a service career we'll dig into properly in a future Journal. She was a French navy vessel of her type, and the records around her are detailed enough that we can do justice to her in the same way we have to other ships in the fleet. For now, we wanted to introduce her by her historical name, give you a first look at the screenshots, and confirm that she is the next ship in line for the longer treatment.

P.S. Any ideas on a name for her? Perhaps we'll open it up for a vote!

Iles des Saintes: The First Sailing Grounds

Moving onto Sea Trials. We're happy to announce that the upcoming release will be set in the Iles des Saintes, a small archipelago of dependency islands belonging to Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. This is the location you'll be sailing around when Sea Trials releases. We actually teased this during the original Kickstarter campaign video!

We're keeping this announcement brief because the work on the location itself is still very much in early stages. The choice of the Iles des Saintes was made carefully. The islands are compact enough to be feasible for the scope of Sea Trials, historically interesting in their own right, and they sit in a part of the Caribbean we'll be returning to in later phases of the project. There is a lot more to say about the location, the period detail going into it, and the small but meaningful amount of land you'll be able to set foot on, but all of that is for future Journals when we have more to show.

For now, simply: when you sail in Sea Trials, this is where you'll be.

The New Ahoy.gg

Alongside this Journal, we're launching the new Ahoy.gg website. It has been rebuilt from the ground up and is now the primary hub for everything related to the project.

The Site Itself

The new site is structured around the three phases of Ahoy. There are dedicated pages for Sea Trials, Arena, and the Open World, each with its own context and detail appropriate to where the work currently sits. The Ships section presents the fleet in considerably more depth than the old site allowed for, with each vessel given the space her history deserves. These ship pages will be updated soon with even more images!

"Frequently" Asked Questions

The FAQ has been overhauled and it now contains not only the questions the community asks the most, but also the questions we feel you should have the answers to. We've gone through over 200 questions covering the project in as much detail as we can to ensure that if you have a question, we've probably already answered it for you.

This goes hand-in-hand with our commitment to transparency with the community, and the FAQ will receive updates and new questions well into the future of the project.

The Store

The Store is part of the new Ahoy website and will be a replacement for the "Late Pledges" system on Kickstarter. The purchase and account systems behind it will be activated soon. We had hoped to have everything go live at the same time as the rest of the site, but during final preparations a couple of security concerns came up that we want to address properly before the systems are exposed publicly. The team is working through those next week, and we'll update you all on when it will be possible to log in, redeem your keys, and upgrade your pledges.

When the Store is live, it will be connected directly to your Ahoy.gg account and will support purchases, late pledges, sharing keys with friends and pledge upgrades from a single place. Earned account credit (from pre-Kickstarter donations and donation-only Kickstarter pledges) will be added to accounts when these systems go live.

We expect there will be some teething issues as the new system opens up. We'll keep you informed if we need to temporarily put anything on hold while we sort those out. Security and safety are paramount to us with this new system, and we'd rather take the conservative path and risk a brief delay than ship something we aren't fully confident in.

For Kickstarter Supporters

If you backed the project through Kickstarter, your account on the new site will already reflect your pledge. There are a few things worth knowing.

Once the Store activates, you'll be able to upgrade to a higher tier directly through the site, with any existing account credit applied automatically and the difference handled cleanly through the new store flow. Tier upgrades carry forward the rewards of the new tier in full (as they will appear on the website), and the system has been designed so that the path from any Kickstarter tier to any higher pledge level is straightforward.

Your existing rewards, both digital and physical, remain attached to your account regardless of any further activity. Nothing about your original pledge is affected by the move to the new site. If you backed at a tier that included a hat, the hat is still on its way. If you backed at a tier that included Arena access, that access is still secured. The migration was designed to preserve every reward and every entitlement, and we have taken considerable care to make sure nothing was lost in transit.

The migration involved a lot of moving parts, and while we've done our best to ensure everything has carried over cleanly, we'd rather hear from you if something is off. For supporters who pledged via Kickstarter and have not yet completed their backer survey, the survey link remains active and you can complete this here. Completing the survey is not optional (as the name "survey" implies), and we are unable to process your individual pledge rewards (digital or physical) until you complete this.

For those who have completed their survey already, no further steps are required and your rewards are not waiting for others to complete theirs.

Cocked Hat Shipping Update

The first batch of physical Captain's Cocked Hat rewards is essentially ready to go. Shipping is targeted to begin from the middle of next week, with one significant caveat for our EU supporters that we'll come to in a moment.

For supporters in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, things are moving forward and you should receive automated tracking emails from the respective couriers as your hat is dispatched. We will also be emailing each of you directly with the same tracking information, just in case the automated email fails to reach you for whatever reason. If you're in one of those four countries and you don't see anything by the end of next week, please get in touch and we'll chase it down.

EU orders are unfortunately held up. To export sold goods into the EU, we need an EORI number, the application for which is already processing. We had been expecting it last week, and at the time of writing we are still waiting on it. The moment it arrives, we'll be able to ship those orders, and we will email each EU supporter directly with an update at that point. We're sorry for the additional wait. It is the kind of regulatory delay we always try to be prepared for, but there is no end to the paperwork it seems! It has still been frustrating to watch the calendar slip while the paperwork is processed.

That accounts for the bulk of the first batch of hats. Beyond that, there are a small handful of hats we are still awaiting address confirmations on. There are also a few hats associated with backers who have not yet completed their Kickstarter survey, and where we therefore do not yet have the sizing information needed to produce the hat itself. Those will come and go as and when the surveys are submitted and our hater Frederick is able to finish producing them.

It is worth saying something about Frederick's work directly. Each hat is hand-blocked, hand-trimmed and finished by him personally, working under his trade name F. Deane Hatt Maker. None of this would have been possible without him. He contributed his time towards Ahoy to help the project's success on Kickstarter and we are incredibly grateful to him for that. The level of detail on each hat, from the trim to the cockade to the lining, is something we are genuinely proud of, and we want every supporter who receives one to receive a piece of work that has been treated with the respect it deserves.

Given the lead time involved in producing each hat by hand, it is unlikely that we will run another sale of them in the immediate future. If you are interested in Frederick's work and would like to support him directly, his shop is well worth a visit to his Etsy store.

As always, if anything is unclear or anything goes wrong in transit, please reach out through [email protected] and we will make it right.

Closing Thoughts

This Journal has covered a lot of ground, and we're aware it has come later than it should have. The balance going forward is to share more, more regularly, and to do it without the long silences that have defined the last few months.

Now that the new site is live and the bulk of the underlying work is in a better state, we expect to be able to do exactly that. We'll be sharing more gameplay footage and more behind-the-scenes work as it becomes ready.

To everyone who has been waiting patiently for this update, thank you. The community that has formed around us is the reason we are able to build Ahoy, and the only honest way to repay that support is to keep the work moving and to keep being straight with you about how it is going.

We'll see you next month!