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Scurvy Scallywags: Ron Gilbert reveals next project with images

Dave Cook avatar
News by Dave Cook Contributor
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Scurvy Scallywags is the next game from legendary adventure game developer Ron Gilbert. Just a week after he bid farewell to Double Fine, he's back with the announcement of his next game. It's described as a "musical match-3 pirate RPG". You can't say the man isn't creative.

The game's full name is Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG, and it's being developed for iOS together with DeathSpank co-creator Clayton Kauzlaric. It should be out within the next month, Gilbert hopes.

Gilbert discussed the project on his blog, and explained, "A few years back, Clayton and I made a match-3 game called Realms of Gold that had a interesting way the board collapsed," Gilbert explained in a post on his blog.

"The game was a RPG, but we were told by the publisher that no one wanted to play a match-3 RPG, so that part of the game was watered down. Of course, a year later Puzzle Quests comes out and sells a billion copies."

"Clayton and I screwed around with it for a bit, then he hit upon a way to make the collapsing work a lot better. Rather than the type of match you made dictating the direction the board collapsed, have the board collapse in the direction you swiped. I made this change and it felt fantastic and very intuitive.

"An odd side effect of doing this was you could move pieces around the board. So unlike Puzzle Quest - and just about every other match-3 RPG that sprang up after it - in Scurvy Scallywags you actually move your hero/pirate around the board and position her/him next to enemies to do battle. It creates this new layer to the matching that is a lot of fun.

"We have close to one hundred different hats, shirts, heads, swords, etc you find and use to dress up your pirate. There are also ten different ships to build, plus a sea shanty you collect that is sung by real life pirate singers (they work for grog, quite inexpensive)."

We've got shots here. Let us know what you think:

Thanks Eurogamer.

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