pirate game?

Alright, I see you have a blog on this but I have purposefully not read anything so as to let the game speak for itself.  Thoughts below organized in the order that I had them:

First, love the main menu theme.  Dunno if you guys made it yourself or got it from somewhere, but it does the job wonderfully.  Your main menu really deserves some sort of art in the background to complement it; an actual fully-fleshed out Attract Mode is of course ideal but I can see why you wouldn't put work into that yet.

However, it's a travesty that your options button is fake.  Fake buttons are an abomination; your GUI should already be able to support greyed-out buttons, and that is far, far superior than making your testers and early adopters wonder if it works or if they've misclicked or something.  Either remove the button entirely for now or visually deactivate it.  This also works wonders down the line as you update; even if your players haven't read the patch notes, there's a visual indication that something has changed.  "Hey, that button works now, finally!  Let's take a look at that".

Upon jumping into a new game, I notice that the music stays up.  While it is a great theme, one of two things needs to happen: either there needs to be a different track for menu/gameplay, or you need to give the main menu no music or perhaps some sea ambience.  There needs to be cohesion in your delivery; not only has the screen changed to show you've entered gameplay, but having the audio reinforce this transition is a must-have.  Better no music than half-assed music.

I got completely swarmed by skeletons while still trying out the controls.  I would give at least 30-60 seconds before spawning the horde (maybe subtract a second for every registered button press?  that way veterans can spam their way to action) so that new players get to figure out that it is indeed WASD to move, click to attack, and that you're in a straight top-down view, which is fairly unconventional. No doubt you and your fellow cohorts would be frustrated to have to wait while testing; just give yourself a secret button combo to press to bypass this entry period.  Having your new players killed right off while they barely have their hands on the right part of the keyboard is very ruthless.

The high score system seems a bit...off. This doesn't seem like an arcadey, see-how-far-you-can-make-it game, this seems more like skyrim or minecraft: adventure and action, with save points and the like.  This needs significant rethinking, I think.  I suppose games such as Heroes of Might and Magic and Nethack have both the saving and the high score, but the sessions I've had so far are far, far shorter than those games.

I started up another new game and found that I was approaching an island instead.  Are the starting positions completely random? Having an initial, perhaps unique quest/scenario that you start with would probably help things seem a bit more cohesive.

The crow's nest at the front of the ship doesn't cull out the player's sprite or weapon.  This is confusing; it makes it seem like a waist-high wall when I think it's intended to be high above the player's head.

Next I fought something green and they dropped gold and stuff.  The gold I picked up by walking over it, but the other items I had to manually click on with the mouse cursor.  This is inconsistent and confusing.  You already have an inventory system (which I found accidentally, more on that in a second), so automatically picking up loot as you walk over it (perhaps with an option to disable that for late-game) would be a superior option.

As for the inventory system, you need a GUI button for that, perhaps to the left of your weapon slot.  I accidentally found it by pressing I, but knowing that I can carry a bunch of things is important to be reflected visually.  The window itself needs work; you might be proud of yourselves for having a real, moveable, resizable window with an X button and all, but I would make the inventory a toggled window with a fixed size and position, something similar to minecraft.  You have your hotbar for mid-battle, no need to have all this freedom with the inventory screen most of the time.

I picked up a Dark Wand and it sucks.  Maybe it's better DPS-wise than the dagger, but it certainly doesn't feel that way.  It's wispy and sluggish, not to mention inconsistent.  My instinct was to click repeatedly to use it, which did not always register.  After experimenting, I found that holding it down was allowed, which is less engaging.  Boring, really.  It doesn't help that the first thing I tested it on was some golems, and with their MASSIVE amount of health, it took forever to kill with this weaksauce weapon that's as big as I am.

You probably need to hide the diagnostic data.  Make the devs hit F5 or whatever to bring it up, don't make the players ignore it.  This should be something only needed when problems arise, not an ever-present reminder that the resolution is bad.

The looking and movement is a bit disconnected.  Intuitively, (from someone who's played a lot of third-person over the shoulder stuff) it makes more sense to have WASD be forward-back-left-right from the avatar's perspective, not locked to compass directions.  This would allow the player to hold W most of the time and just adjust movement direction with the mouse.  Making the player control two different controls schemes with two different hands (left hand world movement, right hand avatar rotation) is clumsy and confusing.

On that note, there is no reason for the camera to have a movement offset like it has right now. Either the player needs to be able to move nearly to the edge of the camera before it moves (super metroid style) or the camera needs to be locked to the player's exact movement.

Is there really a reason for the player movement to be slowed down shen rubbing against the walls?  That sounds like a cheap death just waiting to happen.

Whoop, found the skeletons again.  I had stopped at a port and hired a bajillion hands, but we still got completely crushed.  The best strategy is to move backwards while shooting out of their range, no contest.  Your dialog box is at odds with the action..."skeleton hands coming over the edge" is what I'm told, but now suddenly there's thirty thousand skellingtons all over the ship.  Make them spawn at the edge in short waves!  Don't just tell the player "this is happening", make them play it!  Staggered spawning would allow for much more interesting strategy, as well, especially if orders are ever allowed for the currently useless crew.

There's some very bad spelling mistakes in your dialog.  This is unforgivable, really.  Hopefully you're keeping all your dialog in one document so you only need to do spellchecking in one place; no one wants to go through fifteen different folder's worth of scripts to try and find all the user-facing dialog!  Also in your blog's subtitle, "adventures" and "indie".  Come on, now.

As a last thought, you need to rethink your versioning system.  Looking at the changes from 0.4 to 0.9, you're just barely adding basic, crucial parts of the design, but a 0.9 designation should mean "we're almost done, just polishing a few things here and there before release at 1.0".  Add a second point modifier, I wouldn't expect the game in its current state to be beyond about 0.2.5 or so (this number obviously pulled out of my butt, but all versioning is subjective anyway).

Actually, one final final thought.  I have no idea what the name of your game is. That is absolutely devastating; I'm looking all over the page you linked me and not once is the name mentioned.  I've convinced myself to keep abreast of changes and improvements as they come, and I don't even know what I'm trying to follow!  That's a pretty critical failure that needs fixed on your blog ASAP.

Anyway, it looks like you've got a good set of ideas; it's just the polish, presentation, and content that needs to be refined, but you're overall on the right track.  Keep me updated as things progress!