Raven Watch Studios: Ship's Log

The World Is Up. The Ships are there... kinda.

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Three new pages now! Each one breaks the world down (we call them cupcakes, because that makes it sound enjoyable, who doesn't like a cupcake after all?).

We have:

The World
The Fleet
The People

The World is loosely based on the Spanish Main, a series of islands to explore, find loot, fight bad guys, make friends (and probably die horribly at one point), and discover new harbours and towns. The starting point of every great adventure is usually some run down place, and we are no different. Welcome to Rope's End. It has a deep harbour for the ships that trade goods (or, take others' goods), a tavern, and ummn... not a lot else we will disclose yet. Surrounding Rope's End are the seas from which the game gets its name "Iron Latitudes".

The People is an introduction to the initial cast of characters (10 so far), some good, some bad, some have to decide if they like you or not...

And lastly, the Fleet, 10 classes of ships we are revealing today from the one you hope doesn't sink crossing the cove, to a floating fortress.

The World · The People · The Fleet

What year is it?

So, while the game is founded in historical fact; things like the ships, treasure fleets, pirate names and characters, however... the setting, like all good games, has no real set date. There is no "What year is it?" to really be answered. We set the game in the "Golden Age of Piracy", which is roughly 1550 to 1720.

But whhhhyyyyyy?

It was too restrictive to be blunt. Depending on when we started the game by year, some epic ports would not be there to use, some ships no longer in service, etc... So, we decided to keep it "squishy" so that we could get kind of crazy with the ships available to you all, the ports you can visit, and the characters you will bump into. Like, you can't bump into Henry Morgan AND Blackbeard if we kept the timelines locked down.

...boo!

So, please pardon our liberal misuse of historical timelines. 😉

Ships!

So, we all know this is like... 85% of why anyone wants to play a pirate game... the ships. We might have gone overboard (HA! Dad joke... I'll see myself out). We have a few of them that you will be able to use depending on what career and skills you want to use and how you want to run your fleet.

We are still deep in the weeds of balancing the ships themselves and deciding who goes into the Closed Alpha, the closed Beta, and then Early Access.

However... without further procrastinating... a few that you will find in the game.

What to expect (I mean, unless you clicked the "The Fleet" link above, in which case, this is all just pretty words.)

The Spicy Little Guy: Sloop

A dozen guns on a ship drawing eight feet of water and it could turn on a dime (piece of eight?), and she could still run past twelve knots. A far more utilitarian and powerful ship than her size gives away.

The U-Haul of the Golden Age: Fluyt

You aren't going to win any races in this thing, and you probably should avoid picking a fight. She's not meant to run or fight, she's meant to haul goodies and do so with the smallest crew that could be managed. Great to plunder, great to haul plunder away in, but she will need an escort, else you are just as good as pickin's as she was when you plundered it from the last guy.

The Chonkie Boy: Galleon

The Manila galleons crossed the Pacific for two hundred and fifty years as the most tempting prize afloat, and in all that time only four of them were ever taken at sea. So... big, freaky fast in the right wind, and full of pokey bits. If you can take one, the rewards are worth it, but, make sure your insurance is paid up first.

You let me know how that turns out: Ships of the Line

Basically speaks for itself, they are in the game, pretty much only ever fielded by nation-states and approach at your own risk. Can you capture one? Sure. Will you probably need to replace the boat you attacked it with and most of your crew, also true. Can you get them without finding out what it feels like to wrestle an enraged gorilla in a phonebooth... maaaaaybbbbeeeee.

To see the rest of them, we have set up the Fleet page with a bit more details.

Where are the pictures?!

...working on it! Turns out migrating an asset incorrectly in Unreal Editor is... a bad idea (more on that lesson soon!)

Pictures (AND a video or two) to follow soon.

We Went Quiet. Here Is Why.

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Eight days ago we signed off with a cheerful little "next up," and then went dark. Fair. Here is the honest accounting of where we went.

We tore the studio's website off its old home and rebuilt it from the ground up. The site you are reading this on is the new one. It is hand-built now, leaner, and fully ours. The old setup felt like renting a room in a place we had outgrown, and we finally moved out.

Moving a website sounds like a one-click thing. It is not, and the reason is email. Your website and your email both live in the same little address book called DNS, and if you fat-finger one record during the move, the studio's inbox quietly goes dark and you do not find out until someone tells you three days later that their message bounced. So before we flipped the switch, we went through every single mail record with a magnifying glass, twice, and caught two that would have broken our email if we had missed them. Then we flipped it. Zero downtime. Not a single dropped message. That is the part we are quietly proud of.

And then there is the part we are less proud of. Midway through the migration, the graphics card on the main machine crashed. Then it crashed again. Then a third time for good measure, each time at the exact moment we were in the middle of something delicate. It had nothing to do with the website, which was easy to say afterward and very hard to believe in the moment. We laughed about it. Eventually.

So that is the missing eight days. Plumbing, mostly, the invisible kind nobody notices when it works and everybody notices when it does not.

Now that it is done, we are getting back to a regular rhythm. Some weeks it will be the game. The build already has ships sailing together in co-op, and we are itching to show you. Some weeks it will be the messy behind-the-scenes stuff, like this one. Thanks for sticking around through the quiet stretch. The fun part starts again now.

Chop, Mine, and the Afternoon Mining Was Completely Broken

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

You cannot have a survival-flavored pirate RPG without the two most satisfying verbs in the genre: chopping a tree down and cracking ore out of a rock. So that was the week. Walk up to a palm, swing an axe, get wood. Walk up to a rock with a pickaxe, chip away, get stone.

Here is the war story.

The first time we tried to mine a rock, nothing happened. The character swung. The animation played. The rock sat there, smug, completely intact. We swung again. Nothing. From the code's point of view everything was perfect. The swing was firing, the game was politely reaching out to ask "hey, is there a rock in front of me?" and getting told "nope, nothing here."

The culprit was almost funny. When you swing, the game pokes an invisible feeler out in front of you to find what you hit. Our rocks were half-buried in the ground, the way rocks tend to be, and the ground and the rock were both wearing the same "I am solid world stuff" label. So the feeler hit the DIRT first, every single time, shrugged, and reported back that there was nothing to mine. The rock was right there. The game just kept high-fiving the floor instead.

The fix was small once we understood it. Give harvestable things their own private label that only the harvest feeler looks for. Suddenly the terrain is invisible to the swing and the rock is the only thing it can find. Chip, chip, chip, stone in the bag.

The lesson we keep relearning around here: code that runs clean is not the same as code that works. It looked done. It compiled. It would have sat there looking "finished" for a month. It took one person actually swinging at an actual rock to find out it did nothing at all.

Next up, making the stuff you gather feel worth gathering.

We Almost Built Our Own Combat System. Then We Deleted It.

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Here is a thing nobody tells you about making a game with a tiny team: the hardest calls are not the ones about what to build. They are the ones about what NOT to build.

We spent a good while building on-foot combat from scratch. Swinging a cutlass, blocking, the whole dance. It was coming along. And then we sat down and played a combat framework called Ascent Combat Framework, and within about ten minutes we knew.

The combat is mean, in the best possible way. You cannot face-tank a fight. Mistime a parry and you are dead, fast. It is the kind of weighty, read-your-opponent melee that a soulslike fan feels in their hands. And the honest truth is that a two-person studio was not going to hand-build that to a shipped standard in the time we have, no matter how stubborn we got about it.

So we did the humbling thing. We pulled it apart at the source instead of trusting the marketing, and asked the two questions that actually mattered to us: does it survive co-op, and do we still own our own save data? Both yes. Then we adopted it and started deleting our own work.

That part stings a little. You get attached to code you sweated over. But the job is not to be right about who wrote the combat. The job is to make the fights feel dangerous, and to spend our real hours on the things only we can build: the ships and the world and the pirate-RPG heart of the whole thing.

What it means for you, the person who will eventually be holding the controller: boarding a deck is going to be a real fight. Not a stat-check you click through. A fight you can lose because you got greedy. We are pretty excited about that.

One honest aside, since this whole post is about what we chose not to build ourselves. We are a small team, so we lean on good tools, and one of them is Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. It helps us move faster through the more tedious stretches of the code, the boilerplate and the plumbing. It does not design the game, and it does not make the calls. That part is on us.

More soon, including the week we spent making trees fall over.

Fair Winds: Hello from Raven Watch Studios

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

We think a game world should be able to hold a grudge. Cross a port in spring and it should still be sore about it come autumn. So we're building one that does. (It holds on to the good deeds too. The grudge just makes a better opening line.)

We're Raven Watch Studios, and our first game is Iron Latitudes, a co-op, open-world pirate RPG set in the Golden Age of Piracy. It's built for you and a few friends and nobody else. No PvP, and the only people who can ruin your afternoon are the ones you let aboard. You get a ship that's actually yours and the freedom to go wherever the wind and your worst ideas take you.

It's early days, and we're honest about that. Right now the game amounts to ships that float and sail together in co-op, plus a few hand-built islands and a first port that's half town, half to-do list. There's a long voyage ahead, and we're going to show you the whole thing, including the "we spent three hours and the water still wouldn't fill the bay" nights.

So this is us, weighing anchor. If crewing up with your friends in a world that can hold a grudge sounds like your idea of a good time, stick around. The voyage goes up on this blog as it happens.

Fair winds,

The crew at Raven Watch Studios 🐦‍⬛

Worlds that remember.

Iron Latitudes: Building a Living Pirate World

The crew at Raven Watch Studios — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Most game worlds forget you the moment you log off. The port resets. The harbormaster forgets your name. By morning the waters you bled over are calm and empty again, like you were never there.

Iron Latitudes is our attempt to build one that doesn't.

It's a co-op, open-world pirate RPG set in a grounded New World, the age of sail, roughly 1550 to 1720. No chosen-one prophecy, no glowing runes. Just salt, powder, weather, and a few friends pointing the bow at the horizon to find out what's past the next headland. The world is realistic (the seas, the ships, the ports), and the people and creatures in it are hand-crafted and stylized. Underneath all of it sits one idea we keep coming back to: the world should keep a log of what you did in it.

Here's what that means in practice, framed as the thing we're building toward, not a box we've already ticked.

Win a fight at sea and the beaten ship strikes her colors. Then you make a choice: give quarter, or don't. Sail home, and the port has already heard. Show mercy and they'll call you one thing; put the crew over the side and they'll call you another. You don't name your own legend. The world does, out of what you actually do. That name travels ahead of you; it's spoken in a harbor before your sails clear the point. And it splits: free a hold of captives one week and burn a treasure fleet the next, and different ports will remember you very differently.

That's the spine of it. It isn't a reputation number ticking upward. It's a living record of deeds, carried by the people who saw them. A world with a memory.

And you don't sail it alone. Iron Latitudes is built for co-op from the keel up, you and a small crew of friends, a ship you actually own, no PvP and no lobbies full of strangers. A world is richer with a crew, and the danger in ours (cursed sailors, ghost ships, the older things out of New-World folklore) earns its menace the honest way, not by glowing.

We're early, and we'll always say so plainly. Right now we're deep in the shipwright's work: ships that float and sail together, islands taking shape, the first home port going up one plank at a time. The grand living world is the star we steer by, not a feature we've shipped, and we'd rather show you the honest voyage, leaks in the hull and all, than sell you something that might not survive contact with the water.

So that's the north star: a hand-crafted, persistent pirate world you can sink into with a few friends, one that remembers you were there. If that's your kind of trouble, follow along. We'll be logging the whole journey right here.

Fair winds,

The crew at Raven Watch Studios 🐦‍⬛

Worlds that remember.