Replace the ports with little islands, of course!

what @laaph said :)

but seriously, my suggestions for improvement are:

1. the core gameplay loop is sound. what you do makes sence and the fact that ships dont stop immediately and cant be held back indefinitely is "realistic". so dont touch that.

2. the game is now an infinite game. i recommend making "levels", for instance reach a certain target score. this way you could add more ports/islands over time to increase the complexity over time. this can help pacing and a sense of progress.

3. what i did notice was that the difficulty is very much dependant in what the RNG throws your way. my recommendation would be to "script" (at least the first couple of) levels. this way you have more control over the pacing and allows you to decide when to add additional complexity.

4. add more variety? perhaps an oil tanker that moves slowly but is also very slow to stop? perhaps there are "priority" verhicles that can't be stopped for very long? you get the idea.

5. the music could be a better fit. although it sounds nice, its way to relaxing compared to the chaos that can occur for my taste (perhaps the chaos is on me). perhaps license some royalty free music somewhere? or have the music change based on the number of ships. on screen (i.e. every ship adds an additional instrument or part to the music)?

anyway, these are all suggestions that take can take a lot of time to implement. so, it also depends on how much time you wish to invest in this game.

does this help?

First thoughts

• At first I did not understand what to do, but I quickly realized you need to avoid collison.
• After that, it was quite confusing. The controls didnt really make sense for me. Sometimes I didn't click a ship and it stopped, but I dont know why.
• When a lot of ships swarm the screen, its fun to pay attention to everything at once
• I didn't really understand what exactly clicking a ship does. It stopped (sometimes after going a tile forward), but sometimes it rerouted itself? It looked really unpredictible, and thats not fun.

Gameplay

I liked the game overall. There is not much to do, I got a little bored after 3 rounds, but it was fun at times.

Sound

The music was nice and fitting. The ships could have made sounds when you score a point. The game over sound was a bit out of place and too long in my opinion tho.

Graphics

I really didn't like the graphics. The ships looked okay, (a bit of variety would have been nice), but the water and end points were not a good sight.

Thanks for the feedback, youse.

@laaph
Yeah, crossed my mind that. It might look kind of strange for a ship to start on top of an island and land on top of another island. Then again, this is not supposed to look realistic, so I'll give it a go.

@maartene
Good points, it all helps!

The level generator is very simple and certainly outputs easier layouts occasionally. Will tweak it to be more reliable.

Variety and more features would flesh this out for sure. Not sure if I wish to expand this too much. Simplicity (and lack of time) and all that.

Personally, I like the juxtaposition between the calm music and the navigational chaos. Adding instruments one track at a time could sound rather cool though while also ramping up the intensity when things start rolling proper. I'll give that a go too.

@Sycix

The clicking functions on proximity, so you don't have to exactly hit the ship to pause it. The ship which is paused should just stop and not reroute in any circumstance, I wonder what happened there? The others ships will try to navigate around the stopped ships. A simple tutorial could clear this up (the description merely hints at these features after all)

The end point ports have been temp since the jam. They'll go once a fitting replacement is found. The water stays! (but tweaking will occur)

This game gets very complex very fast! I lost without realizing it, one of the ships timed out. I would have loved if it told me the ship was close to timing out! It would also be nice if the ships perhaps slowed down a little bit before they knew they were going to crash, at least giving me some time to react, and a warning sound and visual feedback as well would be great!

Also, I liked how the ships were able to redirect a path around ships once they were stopped.

Overall, I really like this game! it's very challenging and simple! I think this would be a very good mobile game. In it's current state, I would equivalate this to flappy bird! This will definitely get some reactions out of people, especially streamers I believe.

I would love for some more levels, maybe rewards or upgrades, and even achievements!

Good job!

The concept is nice and the game is fast to play and easy to restart. If you intend to continue working on it, it's important to keep your target audience in mind. If you're going the mobile game route, then you might add things like power-ups (like something to slow down time for X seconds) or any other usual mobile mini-game feature. If you want it as a PC or web mini-game, then I'd keep it as simple as it is now, since people will probably just play this while waiting for something else, so no need to complicate it. Depends on what direction you want to take it.

I think the art is fine since the gameplay is clear and it's not distracting. It's not the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, but it gets the idea across.

For the ports, I guess you can keep the round base, and put some densely packed skyscrapers to convey the idea that it's a city.

The improvements you've made are very welcome :) Maybe I would have added a flashing light when the timer on a ship you stopped come to an end. When there are a lot of boat, it's difficult to keep an eye on everything, and I've been surprised several times by a timer coming to en end :)