Harbour Master
Can you plan sailing routes for ships to safely reach their destination?
Welcome to the port, and your first day on the job!
These waters are busier than ever and it is your job to help the many ships passing through plan their route to each destination. Sounds simple enough, right? Well be careful, as the sea is a dangerous place. You will need to plan out each ship's route across the ocean while trying to avoid the likes of pirates, skeleton ships, and even mighty sea creatures lurking below the waves.
Think you are up to the task?
How to play:
Head over to the itch.io to play in browser or download a Windows, Mac, or Linux build!
Select a ship from the top of the screen by clicking on it. Then, draw a route on the map from your home port to another port. Then wait to see if the ship made the voyage! It takes one day to travel each square, so if a ship is lost at sea, you can determine where that happened and plan your next voyage accordingly.
Credits:
Programming by liamlime
Art and music by alyphen
Writing by ErrorNikki
Comments (3)
Great intro and music! Very cheerful, in contrast with the many brave ships and crews I sent to their doom afterwards… the great writing drove that point home quite effectively.
This is an interesting concept, but it needs a bit more work. Counting backwards along the line is tedious and uninteresting for gameplay, so you might as well make the game place the markers already. And if a ship made it so far, why isn't the route up to its demise revealed as water already?
It's not clear to me whether the beasties move around, but this presents a game design conundrum. If they move, it makes the game too random, trial-and-error like. (I know one of the themes is CHAOS but too chaotic is no fun either.) If they don't move, it makes the game too static (albeit with no good way for the player to keep track of that static information).
Graphically, the individual sprites are nice, especially the ships, but they don't go very well together in terms of pixel size and level of detail.
There are some minor technical issues: the music only plays once, and you lose the line if you drag too quickly.
I think I won the game :)
It took a lot of trial and error and bruteforce (in other words, a lot of killed crews :D) to beat it! thomastc's feedback is pretty much on point I think. In the end it played a bit like a minesweeper where we get less, more diluted hints but an unlimited amount of tries to compensate.
The setting and UI are pretty enjoyable though, exploring the map tile by tile was promising and made me stick to the game long enough to connect all islands. Props for the intro that sets the tone of the game and the cool flavor text after each mission.
Good job.
After reading instructions, I "got it" and was able to play.
It kept freezing up on me, so I didnt do more than one voyage apiece.