(c) Copyright 2003-2004 by Pontus Munck, Spinrock Productions
Port of Haven is a web based multiplayer game containing strategic and tactical elements mixed with role-playing ingredients. As a player you will experience the thrill and excitement of the pirate era and learn what it takes to build up a successful career in a Caribbean setting.
This document is a design reference describing the gameplay features and rules for Port of Haven. It is meant to be used as a guide and manual for the developers during the project to ensure that everyone are working towards a common goal. It currently contains the vision of how the game will be, but will eventually contain everything that the game has become.
Note: This is work in progress! The document is constantly refined and filled with new information during the development. This means that some portions may be inadequate and even incorrect.
Port of Haven is a game that takes place in a flourishing yet politically instable fictitious area of the Caribbean Sea in the 17th century. It is a place for aspiring merchantmen, politicians, buccaneers, pirates and just about anyone with an urge to set sail for greater glory. The geographical area is desirable for its resource richness of tobacco and gold and therefore under constant pressure from the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese who try to control it by taking over towns and villages. This is where players get together and fight together or against each other for victory.
<to be done>
This chapter explains the concept of the game and the features it contains. After reading this chapter you should have a good picture of what the game contains and what the game experience will be like.
Port of Haven is a game that offers players multiple career choices. You start out small, slowly building your family economy and reputation and soon discover that there are many ways to success in the world. You can become a merchantman traveling over the seas with highly demanded goods, a pirate overtaking and pillaging weaker vessels, a clever tradesman who establishes vendors in many towns and villages, or maybe a governor influencing and controlling the political development in the area. All in all, the game should provide a large depth to explore, learn and master as you play along.
You begin with your own character and a basic starter ship. Your first task is to build up a small crew and set sail with this small boat. By traveling around the seas trading, attacking other ships, hunting treasures or doing missions you gain money and reputation enabling you to expand your fleet with larger ships and hiring other captains to work for you.
As a player you are more or less free to choose your own career path depending on what you like to do most. However, you must choose wisely since your past actions may affect the viability of future choices. Beginning as a cutthroat pirate is not exactly a good way to start a political career for example.
Characters are the male and female people living in the game world. Players control one or more characters that interact with other characters in various ways.
There are a few different types of characters in the game. This chapter will explain what they are and their purpose in the game.
Family characters are characters that are members of a family, i.e. biologically tied to a family by birth. The family characters are controlled by the player who is in charge of the family, meaning that he is the one to give the characters orders of what to do next.
Family characters have some benefits compared to other characters in the game. These benefits are:
Captain characters are somewhat similar to family characters in that they are used by players to carry out orders. However, they are not tied to a specific family and may join or leave you at anytime.
Captains can be recruited in towns or villages and the available choices you have depend on your family reputation. Well known, experienced captains seldom choose to work for a pitiful, poor family with bad reputation, but a new aspiring captain may just do that to prove his worthiness in the community.
Good captains are hard to come by and they know it, which means that they will demand a big wage and cut of the profit if they are going to work for you. Their skills are highly important for the success of your family, so don’t be cheap!
Contacts are your eyes and ears to the surrounding world. These characters are people that you have met and established contact with, usually in the local tavern of a town or village. If you keep in touch with them regularly they may grow to be your best friends and provide you with some valuable information. Thus, your contacts are an important key to getting to know the world in which the game takes place.
Not only are contacts important for getting information, but if your play your cards wisely one of them may even turn out to be your wife some day!
On the other hand, if you show little or no interest in a contact, your friendship will just simply fade away. This is no problem if you think that their advice is bad, or if you simply have no time for them. That is just life.
Your contacts can help you by telling you rumors or facts that they have heard since the last time you spoken to them. They do things such as:
You should however be aware of the fact that some contacts may give you bad advice and plain false rumors just to impress you. This is more often the case when your reputation is high and you are well known.
Contacts that are very close to you may send you important messages to wherever you are, but a much better way of making sure that you receive all the information they have is to actually visit them often. This also improves your relation with them.
In Port of Haven there are no professions. Any character may do anything they want, as long as they have the skills to do it. This creates an open ended world that does not limit what players want to do, or what road to head next. You can mix and match skills to create your very own unique characters to suit your playstyle. As the game progresses and your family grows you will probably find yourself building each character for a certain purpose, and train only the skills that make sense for that particular idea.
Although there are no implicit professions in the game, it sometimes helps to think about different types of gameplay and relate it to professions. This is what we are doing in this chapter.
Bounty hunters try to hunt down and kill wanted pirates to collect bounties. They get tips from their contacts about the whereabouts of a certain target and they also use the Tracking skill to nail down the exact location of someone.
Constructs and repairs buildings.
The merchant specializes in buying, transporting and selling goods. He uses his contacts and the Merchant skill to find the most lucrative trade routes and the best prices.
The pirate seeks out and attacks weaker vessels to plunder their cargo.
The politician has the ability to run towns and villages. This allows him to collect taxes on traded goods and use this money to improve the local facilities.
Constructs and repairs ships of various types and models.
The smuggler is proficient at moving illicit material past guard ships without being detected. Even if stopped and inspected, the smuggler can get away with it by using the Smuggling skill efficiently.
Constructs weapons of various types and models.
All characters in the game have a set of skills that determine how good they are at performing different operations.
The skills and skill levels are used to limit what the character can do, as well as determine how successful an operation is when it is carried out. For example, a character first needs to learn how to command a certain ship before even being able to sail it. When he has learned the skill to the required level he may sail the ship, but he can also continue to train the skill to get an additional bonus added.
To learn a new skill means to acquire basic knowledge about it. This is done by purchasing and learning from a book that describes the basics of the skill. After the book has been studied the character gains knowledge level 1 in the skill and may begin to use it. Some skills are common and may be purchased nearly anywhere at a cheap price, while others are more rare and not so easily learned. Some skills are only available from NPC characters.
To get better at a skill a character must train. Training requires both theory and practice. Theory involves learning from a book or being teached by another character who has the skill (at least 1 level higher). Practice means to actually use the skill. Advancement in a skill happens when both theory and practice have reached a certain level.
For example, Captain LeChuck has decided that it would be great to be able to repair the ship at sea. He has no knowledge in ship repairing so he buys the Book of Repairment and starts to study. After a while he is finished and has now acquired the Repairment skill (level 1). However, level 1 does not do much good. He would like to advance a bit. To reach level 2 he must first study the theory and then practice the skill. He meets with a character who can teach him Repairment (level 2). Being taught by another character is significantly faster than studying on your own, and often also cheaper than purchasing a book. Once he has learned enough theory for level 2 he will start to gain practice experience in the skill every time it is used. This means that every time he repairs the ship, he works his way to level 2. Meanwhile he can continue to study to level 3 to avoid stalling his progress.
This is the complete list of skills available in the game along with a brief explanation of what they mean and how they are used.
| Name | Description |
| Bartering | The ability to affect the buy/sell price at the market. |
| Commerce | The ability to find good trade routes. |
| Gunnery | The ability to handle guns in sea battles. |
| Inspection | The ability to find hidden goods on ships. |
| Leadership | The ability to lead a crew. |
| Navigation | The ability to handle a ship at sea. |
| Naval combat | The ability to perform in sea battles. |
| Repairment | The ability to repair a ship (usually at sea). |
| Scouting | The ability to detect other ships. |
| Ship crafting | The ability to craft ships. |
| Smuggling | The ability to hide goods from inspectors and pillagers. |
| Sneaking | The ability to sneak past other ships without being discovered. |
| Tracking | The ability to track down the location of a character in a certain area. |
| Weapon crafting | The ability to craft weapons. |
The family is a central part of your identity as a player, since it is the family economy and reputation that you are building. A family consists of one or more family characters, all controlled by a single player. The family may own ships and hire employees.
When the game begins you decide a name for your family and create a new character that you will control. This new character becomes your first family character, or if you will, your alter ego.
During the course of the game the family characters have the ability to get married and have children, thus expanding the family tree. The children can, once they grow up, be controlled just as their parents, and become a part of the family empire helping to raise your income and reputation in the world.
Building a family history is one of the interesting things about the game. As new children of the family grow up and begin to create a name of their own, they are also a part of the family and all work to help you reach new heights in the game. This means that the children slowly become your new alter egos, each with a certain amount of skills inherited from their parents and a special place in your heart.
However this also means that characters grow old and die as time goes by. This is a natural part of the game, and a key to how it differs from pure role-playing games where the character is the central point of focus. In Port of Haven, characters are not central but merely the means with which you build your family’s fame and fortune.
To make your family grow you need to find a spouse. This is done by giving one of your contacts a lot of attention and love until she seems to be open for proposal. Once this happens you may propose her to marry you and if you are lucky, she will accept. Being engaged has no other benefits than the simple fact that you can marry your spouse after you have established a home.
There is no place like home, and in Port of Haven your home is your haven and place of peace and tranquility.
When you get engaged to be married with one of your contacts you must establish a home base where your family will be situated before the marriage can take place. You build your own house or mansion (depending on how much money you want to spend) in a friendly town or village for a onetime cost and then pay a regular land fee to the local governor.
Your home is a place where you can regain strength and build morale after a defeat. It is also a great place to be if you want to conceive a child so make sure you visit home often during these times.
When your home is established you can go ahead and marry your wife. When you marry her she will move to your home and take care of the house and children while you are gone.
Since the world in which the game takes place hosts abundant islands scattered throughout a vast ocean, all traveling in the world is done using ships.
You begin with a basic, weak starter ship that you upgrade and improve as you grow stronger. Once you have equipped it and made it better fit for fight, you can take on some weak enemies. You may also buy larger and better ships when economy permits.
In order to maneuver and control a ship it requires a captain and a crew. The captain, crew and ship together are called a party. You may own and control many ships as long as you can assign captains to them all. Ships without a captain are kept docked in a safe port for a small fee.
When a character is assigned to a ship, he becomes the ship’s captain. A ship captain can be any family character or captain character available to the player.
Assigning the right captain for a party is an important task as his skills largely influence the ship and the crew’s ability to perform well in various situations.
Since one man is not enough to maneuver an entire ship a crew must also be assembled. All ships have a minimum amount of crew members required for the ship to set sail.
During long journeys the crew needs food to be able to work. Without enough food they will starve and eventually die. A starving crew is less efficient and much weaker than a healthy crew when it comes to fighting. The morale of a hungry crew will sink to the bottom and the captain is in great risk of being killed in a mutiny. Also, letting the crew starve isn’t exactly the best way of gaining a good reputation in the world, so make sure the food does not run out!
The crew morale is influenced by the leadership skills of the captain, but it can also be boosted by bringing rum on a journey. Ensuring that the crew has plenty of rum may be a key to ruling the sea.
Crew members can be recruited in towns and villages. Besides the food and rum they consume, they also demand a regular wage. The quality and quantity of people available to join your crew depends on your reputation.
You can also force crew members of another ship to work for you when you pillage the ship. Using pressed men is a cheap way of filling the crew, but you should remember that those new people won’t be loyal to you when the going gets tough!
All ships have cargo holds with a size ranging from tiny to very large. The larger cargo hold you have, the more cargo you can bring along, but the amount of cargo also affects the speed and maneuverability of the vessel which can be crucial during battle.
All ships have a set of attributes that determine the ability of the ship to handle certain situations.
These are the available attributes for ships:
There are some different types of ships available in the game. Each ship type has its benefits and drawbacks and this is to make sure that no ship is the ultimate choice in all situations. Here is a list of the available ship types:
| Ship type | Description |
| Sloop | Small single-masted ship. Small, weak, but very fast and maneuverable. |
| Pinnace | Small three-masted square rigged ship. Fast and maneuverable, but relatively small and weak. |
| Fluyte | A medium sized three-masted trade ship. Cheap, quite fast and good cargo space, but relatively weak in combat. The most common type of trade ship. |
| Frigate | A large, three-masted warship. Good attack coupled with average defense and decent speed. |
| Merchantman | A large, three-masted trade ship. Slow, clumsy and expensive, but with a large cargo space and decent defense. |
| Galley | A large, three-masted light warship. Good maneuverability and defense, with a decent attack. |
| War Galleon | A very large, three-masted heavy warship. Powerful attack, good defense, but with bad maneuverability. |
| Dreadnought | A huge, three-masted heavy warship. Devastating attack, good defense, but very bad maneuverability. |
Ships also come in different brands and models that affect the attributes subtly. The exact characteristics and attributes of a ship are determined both by the ship type and the brand.
This chapter shows how the different ships compare to each other and tries to explain how each type fit in the game.
The ships available in the game fulfill these two goals of the design:
You start out with a small, weak and lousy ship that isn’t really useful for anything at all but getting you started. However, as useless as it is, it protects you with its excellent speed making it impossible for more powerful players with bigger ships to catch it.
The progression you make is to buy new ships in order to be able to attack other players and do more profitable trading runs. There is a natural ladder of progression built into the “bigger is better” principle that will push players to upgrade their ships. Better ships will have an advantage over smaller ships, but the speed of the smaller ships creates a “combat gap” that ensures that smaller ships are never totally squashed by an impossible opponent.
There is no real top of the progression ladder, but instead it has a circular relationship between the strongest ships in a traditional stone-scissor-paper form. This means that among the strongest ships, there is always one opponent type that has the edge over you that you should stay away from. This ensures that no one can be certain to be the strongest always, thus creating an intriguing strategic and tactical challenge for the players.
The payoff matrix shows how the different ship types are balanced against each other. Rows should sum up to zero to achieve a unit that is well balanced with both benefits and drawbacks. Positive values means strong and negative values means weak. Zero means average.
| Attack | Defense | Maneuverability | Speed | Economy | Trade | |
| Sloop | -3 | -2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | -2 |
| Pinnace | -2 | -1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | -1 |
| Fluyte | -2 | -1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Frigate | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -1 | 0 |
| Merchantman | -1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | -2 | 2 |
| Galley | 2 | 1 | 1 | -1 | -2 | -1 |
| War Galleon | 2 | 2 | -1 | -1 | -2 | 0 |
| Dreadnought | 4 | 2 | -2 | -2 | -2 | 0 |
Explanation of what the payoff matrix measures:
| Ability | Description |
| Attack | How good the ship is at attacking, i.e. how much damage it does to an enemy. This includes its power, attack speed and accuracy. |
| Defense | How good the ship is at defending when being hit, i.e. how good it is at sustaining damage. This includes its hit points and armor. |
| Maneuverability | How easy the ship is to handle in combat, i.e. how good it is at avoiding damage by keeping the range to the enemy. |
| Speed | How fast the ship is at traveling and thus avoiding combat altogether. A ship that is two units faster than another one almost always outsails it. |
| Economy | How expensive the ship is to buy and own. This includes min/max crew size, market price and repair cost. |
| Trade | How good the ship is at performing trading runs. This includes navigation speed and cargo size. |
The values in the payoff matrix should give a good picture of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual ship. In this chapter we will analyze what it says and add a few comments on how the ships relate to each other.
Ships get damaged in battles but are also worn and torn during long journeys. A damaged ship will not perform as good as a ship that is in mint condition. This makes it important to perform repair work as often as possible.
Ships can be repaired in friendly towns and villages at the shipwright. Some repairs can also be done at sea if the ship has been heavily damaged in battle. How well this works depends on the repairment skills of the captain.
The constant wearing of a ship will lower its quality over time and as it gets older it will no longer be possible to repair it to full condition anymore. This goes on until the quality is so low that the ship is ready for the scrap yard unless it is sold before that.
This is to ensure that players need to buy new ships over and over again, thus feeding the economy.
Traveling around the seas is one of the things in the game you need to learn to become successful. This is obvious, since many of the career paths involve trade or battles at sea.
Navigation is used to move your ships around in the world. You navigate by giving the captain of a ship orders to follow a specific course. A course can be as simple as a straight line between the departure and destination ports or it can include a number of waypoints to allow for cleverer planning of how to get to the destination. Detailed planning of the course may be needed to avoid areas with a lot of pirates or reefs.
The captain of a ship will follow the course to the destination even when you are not online. If anything should happen during the journey, the captain will try to make the most sensible thing in the situation such as escaping from impossible fights. How well this works of course depends on the ability of the captain.
At anytime during a journey a player can record a waypoint at the current position of a ship. This recorded waypoint is placed in a list of significant locations along with a short comment.
Whenever a player needs to find back to a significant location he can recall the recorded waypoint and have it show up as a directional arrow on the map. This allows him to plot a course towards the location and more easily find his way to the target. This aids players to find their way across the entire world map.
The most important thing to consider when setting out on a long journey is the amount of supplies carried. You need to make sure that you have enough food for the crew to survive the whole trip. You may find that it is necessary to make a stop on the way to your destination, just to buy more supplies.
When giving orders to set sails and follow a specified course, an estimate of the time it will take and how much food required is shown. You can then adjust how hard the men should work and how much food they should be given. This affects how much food that is required, but also how much time it takes to the destination.
It is also a good idea to bring some rum on the journey to ensure that the morale of your crewmen is high.
The crew will be able to work without any food for a limited amount of time. This makes it possible to do short journeys with no food but the crew morale will suffer. This ensures that new players will be able to sail when they begin playing.
Sea journeys are seldom a walk in the park. Pirates are lurking everywhere waiting to lay their hands on your cargo. Even if you are a pirate yourself, your valuable, looted goods are not safe until you successfully dock in a town or village and sell it off to the merchant. Some areas have more pirates than others so it sometimes takes some careful planning to get from one point to another on the map. Your contacts may have useful hints about certain areas around them so make sure you talk to them!
Naval battle is a central concept of the game which means that it should be fun and entertaining. This chapter explains how it works.
Naval battle is initiated whenever a captain chooses to attack another ship. In order to be able to attack, the target must be within the eight map squares surrounding your ship. Otherwise it is out of range.
During battle players may choose from a range of actions to perform. By carefully judging the situation and knowing the capabilities of your captain and the enemy, a battle tactic can be laid out.
<different ammunition (regular round shot, grapeshot, chain shot>
<skjuta med alla kanoner (mycket dmg, lång reload-tid), eller skjuta med hälften (mindre dmg, men fler träffchanser)>
<försöka fly>
All characters have a fame rating. Whenever something good is performed, the fame rating increases. Whenever something bad is done, like attacking an innocent ship, the fame rating decreases. How much depends on the circumstances.
When the fame rating goes negative, the character is becoming infamous. Attacking infamous people gives less penalties, or no penalty at all for the attacker. If the rating goes below -1 there will be a bounty reward for capturing or killing the character.
Most of the sea battles ends with one ship surrendering or being shot until it is incapable of sailing anymore. When a ship surrenders, the other ship must seize attacking. The attacker may pillage the ship after boarding it.
Attacking and sinking a ship that has surrendered lowers the attackers fame rating heavily. This is to discourage bad behavior among the pirates.
If a character dies, he is resurrected in his hometown. Resurrection is free the first few times, but after that the character will start to lose skills.
<friendly or unfriendly>
Trading is an important ingredient of the game. Buying and selling goods is an excellent way of increasing your funds, as long as you follow the rule "buy low, sell high". Goods can be bought and sold in towns and villages on the local market. If you want to be a true pirate you can also steal goods from other ships which usually should give you a neat profit.
You may set up your own market stand in any friendly town or village. By doing this you can sell or buy goods from other players. If your sales prices are lower or equal to the local population’s market, other players will automatically buy from you instead. This is an excellent option for making money since many local population markets often are lacking important goods and may be overpriced in certain areas. In the same way, you may set a purchase price that is higher or equal to the local market for certain goods thus making sure that players sell their goods to you. This may be a useful way of having other players help you out if you also run a workshop requiring certain rare goods for operation.
Buying and selling is not the only thing that can be done with goods. It can also be used when crafting new items. The simplest form of crafting is refining raw material, but crafting can also involve construction of expensive items like weapons and ships.
In order to manufacture something you need blueprints. The blueprints define exactly what material is required and how an item is assembled.
Blueprints are very rare but can be acquired occasionally from the market or from friendly governors.
After a blueprint is in your possession you can establish a workshop in a friendly town or village. The workshop is where the actual manufacturing process will take place. The required goods and material for the construction must be delivered to the workshop before the work begins.
The cost for establishing the workshop depends on the item or goods that will be manufactured there.
<uppdrag från kontakter>
<typer: frakta varor, träffa någon, hitta någon, döda någon>
Players may go treasure hunting if they want to. Treasure maps can be acquired from contacts and usually come in pieces, so you need to find all the pieces before you can actually see where the treasure is buried. Some treasures are small and easy to find, while others take more work but give alot of money in return.
Factions are political alliances run by players containing one or more families. Any family can start a new faction, or join an existing one when invited. To start a new faction the family must appoint a faction leader with the required skills in politics and leadership.
A faction has the ability to take control of land. This is done by appointing a governor from the faction in a town or village. The faction gains benefits such as collecting taxes and getting defensive and offensive bonuses while they are in their own controlled land.
New players do not belong to any faction. As long as they stay out of factions, no other player can attack them. They can still be attacked by NPC ships though.
Factions gain power through the number of members it has. This makes it important for factions to actively seek out new players and convince them to join their cause.
Factions may declare war on another faction. Factions that are in war may attack each other at will.
Resources is the common name for all the tradeable goods in Port of Haven.
In this chapter we list all the resources that are available in the game.
| Resource name | Description |
| Cotton | |
| Gems | |
| Gold | |
| Iron | |
| Silver | |
| Stone | |
| Sugar | |
| Tobacco | |
| Wood |
This chapter explains the mechanics and rules of the game forming the game play. After reading this chapter you should have an idea of what the rules of the game are, how they interact to achieve the desired game play described in an earlier chapter and why the rules have been formed in the way they have.
The concept of time in Port of Haven is handled a bit differently from other web based games. It is implemented in a sort of hybrid between a traditional turn based game and a tick based game.
The time in the game is divided in ticks. When a new tick occur the time advances in the game, i.e. the database is updated according to the current orders that players have given. Ticks occur every five minutes.
Many orders in the game are tick based, which means that they take a certain amount of ticks to be carried out. Sailing the ship from one place to another is an example of such an activity. These orders are carried out even you are not online.
In between the turns, while waiting for the next tick to occur, player may carry out actions. Actions are atomic activities that are carried out right away when you give the order, and the database is updated accordingly. Combat activities, such as giving special firing orders or boarding a ship, are examples of such actions.
Every action cost a certain amount of action points to carry out. All characters that you control have a certain amount of action points that can be spent on performing actions each turn.
New action points are given out to all characters at the beginning of each turn. All characters are given the same amount of points, and there is a maximum amount of points that can be accumulated over time.
This chapter describes the user interface in general. The main focus is to ensure consistency and usability without restricting the artistic freedom.
We strive to keep the user interface and controls as simple and intuitive as possible, using conventional and accepted standards whereever appropriate. Anyone should be able to start playing the game and perform basic operations without reading a manual.
The game has a number of views that are used to present information to the player as well as let the player give orders. This section lists all views and describe their functionality. It also defines any special controls that the view has.
The main view is the most important view in the game as this is where the player spend most of their time. It needs to give the player the most necessary information and feedback without being cluttered.
The main view is used for controlling and overviewing your ships as well as other assets in the game world.
| Selecting units | Selecting a unit is done by left clicking it. |
| Moving the view | The view can be scrolled by holding down the left mouse button at a location where there is no selectable object and dragging the map around. The map can also be scrolled using the arrow keys on the keyboard, and by clicking arrow buttons on screen. |
| Giving orders | Orders are given by right clicking and selecting an order from the popup menu that appears. The popup menu is contect sensitive and depends on what unit that is selected, and what you right click on. |