News — the dev log

What we've been working on, what we've updated, and what we've troubleshot and fixed along the way — kept by date, newest first. Ransack is in active development and playtesting, so this page moves as the work does.

October 14, 2026

A name worth fearing. The game is now Ransack — named for the verb at its heart. The studio took its own name the same day: Goat Locker Studios, after the chiefs' mess aboard ship, and this site went live.
The tester build has a home. Ransack now plays at its own address in your browser, and the studio's post reaches us at support@ and hello@. Small thing, large feeling.
Audio, rebuilt from tester reports. Our first playtesters told us plainly: the music mix ran heavy, and sound could tangle where scenes change hands. We rebalanced the mix and fixed the handoff seam, and the guided tour now steps aside politely instead of taking over the screen. All of it is live in the current tester build — and it's why we test.
Combat takes the stage. We built the canvas stage that visual combat will live on, and staged our first broadside fight on it. One rule governs every staged fight: watch it, or let it resolve on its own — the outcomes must match. We audit that, fight by fight, and so far they do.
New faces aboard. Ninety new crew portraits painted and inspected, plus the ship's animals — a dog, a cat, and a parrot with opinions. They report for duty in the next tester build.
Sprites, honestly. The first full pass at top-down ship sprites for staged sailing and combat is under way. The painting engine has many talents; counting masts is not among them. A reinforced second pass ran tonight and dressed about a third of the fleet — the rest will be finished by editing from the hulls that came out right.
On the drawing board. A smuggling system — goods banned in one port are merely cargo in the next, if you can get them past the customhouse — designed to ride with the coming port-trading economy. And the fleet grows on paper: six new hull classes designed, from a weather-wise cutter to a ship of the line you have to take, not buy.

October 13, 2026

The score. A full original soundtrack sprint: 42 tracks composed and captured — harbours, open sea, storms, battles, and the strange places between — with fiercer and calmer variants of the battle music that follow the fight's temperature.
Voices. English voice work for the officers and story beats, with subtitles in 21 languages, so the crew can be understood in every port we know.
Troubleshot: the vanishing intro. Returning players stopped seeing the opening film — a saved flag from their first visit was quietly suppressing it forever. The film now plays on every launch, with a Skip button while it runs and a "don't show again" setting for captains who've memorised it.
Fair rules, locked in writing. No pay-to-win. No gacha. No subscriptions. A captain's standing is earned in titles, privileges, and reputation — never bought, never rolled for. That's not a launch promise; it's the constitution the game is being built under.

October 12, 2026

Development begins. Ransack starts life: a pirate strategy game about one ship and the crew who make her dangerous. The core loop — build her up, crew her, voyage, trade, board, and answer for the bounty on your head — playable end to end in the first prototype.
The tone is set. Salty pirate grit first, comedy in the margins — the sea is dangerous, the crew is funny, and both are true at once.

Older news will gather here as the work lands. If you're playtesting and something breaks, baffles, or delights you, the feedback link inside the game — “Send word to the crow's nest” — reaches us directly, and the fixes it causes will show up on this page.