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How does your game fit the theme?
You are a novice lighthouse keeper in a post-apocalyptic world where the entire continental America got destroyed by a nuclear experiment gone wrong.
The shockwave of the explosion caused a massive tsunami that flooded most of Europe and Africa and Asia.
You are one of the few survivors and you have to keep the lighthouse running as another storm is looming on the horizon.
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
The game was made entirely from scratch, including the code and assets and even the engine itself.
We are using just HTML/Svelte and TypeScript/JavaScript and (S)CSS.
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Comments
Really impressive game. I would have liked it more if I could move faster on boat
Thanks for playing <3
An impressive amount of depth and attention to detail! Great concept to build on, just recommend focusing on the pacing!
Thank you :D Appreciate the compliment!
the game looks and sounds amazing. it's really impressive doing this with javascript and html.
i also loved the map, an amazing concept
my only problems is that the game feels to slow and could give some more information for the player as to what to do - what items should i store in the lighthouse etc
This is really good. However, boats are way too slow. I think it would help if there was a way for the player to change the game speed at any time kinda like how it is in Rimworld.
not my style of game but it is really apparent that a lot of work and attention to detail was put in this one!
I have just one point of feedback, the camera felt really slow, also I wish I could just move it around with wasd.
good job!
Thanks for playing! WASD / arrow keys to move the camera has been a quite suggested feature we will look into adding in the post jam update. :D We mainly were looking into making the game accessible and playable on both mobile & desktop :)
keep at it and good luck <3
Took me like an hour to "survive the storm", but that's fine, I just played it like an idle game while watching youtube. I honestly really like these sorts of management games, especially when they feature any sort of economy systems. Don't know why, just think they're neat. Also certainly didn't expect to see a game with the 'Sid Meiers Pirates' gameplay loop of running a shipping company.
The fact that I did play an hour should tell you all you need to know. I really enjoyed it. Audio design was minimal, but good, same with the visuals, and the gameplay loop was relaxing and very nice.
Well done!
Happy you enjoyed playing our game <3
Did you by any change screenshot your completion time? In that case I'll add you to our leader-board :D
We really enjoyed working on this project, and I'm already working on a polishing update to push post judging <3
Afraid I did not screenshot it :P it was like an hour and ten-ish minutes.
I really like the art and the concept of trading and building a fleet. I just feel like it's too slow paced though, especially for a game jam game. I'm sitting almost blowing at the screen to make my ships sail faster. I also felt like the theme was not very incorporated, maybe there should be storms often to quicken up the pace of the game. It's a beautiful game with the art and clouds and I like the sound effects and music. It's very polished and I'm impressed how much you've managed to do in a week.
Good work!
Game Design: The gameplay is fairly simple requiering you to go from a to b and pick up items while avoiding land wich is really hard to hit, Sadly boats cant hit each other so there goes a great oppertunity to make the gameplay more interesting. But what really held back the game are the camera controlls, they are slow and for some reason it goes faster when you move your mouse off the button(wich probaply isnt intended) other than that the game design is pretty decent, altho there are a few important elements missing in the comunication with the player such as showing a price tag for buying and selling items so you could calculate your profit e.g.. 8/10
Fun: The story seems liek a heavy foxus of the game and it starts of pretty good. The concept itself seems really fun and relaxing but because of the limited time the camera controlls feel clunky stopping the fun at a .6/10
Innovation: Its not the most innovative game as there are a lot of simmilar games, it reminded me a lot of some mobile airplane trafic controller game but its in a unique setting this time and has a few own ideas. 6.5/10
Theme: It doesnt reflect in the mechanichs. The storm part is implemented into the story, but unfotnitually the story is more about a break after the storm before the next smaller storm ? The story started really well with the calm before the tsunami hits europe but then during the actuall game it has already hit europe for somer reason 6/10
Graphics: I lile the color scheme, really fits the vibe, there are a ton of mixels tho making it look cheap wich could have been avoided, there were 3 artists so you should have had enough time for that but i know how hard it can be to manage a bigger group of people. The font doesnt really match but it still looks cohesive thanks to the colors. 6/10
Sound: The sound design is really nice, there are even audio settings 9/10
Overall its a good game jam game with a bunch of content but it does lack at quality here, Id normally let that pass but with 6 people it could have gone better, there might have been trouble in the team but I cant know that so ill round it up to a 7/10
The beginning does feel a bit slow, and the movements of the boat a bit tricky, but I love the presentation and the mood
Definitely gotta finish it haha
Thanks for playing the game on stream!
Looking forward to seeing you on the leaderboard :P
I'll preface by saying RTS usually isn't something I go for, but adding the time leaderboard on the side enticed me to really get into how the game works.
The ambiance is relaxing despite the sort of bleak story, and the foggy visuals accentuate both sides of that comparison to me, so it felt really well put together.
Moving my ships did feel a bit inconsistent. I think there might be a check trying to stop me from drawing a path directly over land or a town, but it also happened a lot when just clicking, so it felt somewhat random at times whether my command to move a ship would go through. I did also face the issue of getting my ships stuck under towns in my earlier runs, but it is avoidable.
I do like the randomization aspect, it really facilitates on-the-fly decision making and routing when doing runs. Though there are some truly evil seeds in there (no-one buying anything at the 4 nearest lighthouse shops) so I definitely cut some runs short just by looking at the map. In particular if one of the items needed was exclusive to a certain town on the top-middle-right.
Randomizing the ships on the other hand was interesting but a bit frustrating at times. In practice I often would just look to see if I got a good map, and deal with the hand I was dealt as far as ships came. A particularly not great first ship I got could only hold one barrel of water while also not being too fast. and I'm honestly not sure how good armour could be since I just avoided land wherever I could? Maybe it'd help me brute my way to that far off town if I tried it.
All that being said I appreciated the humor in the opening journal, and the chance to flex my routing brain muscles. I maybe could've done better if I was willing to deal with more ships at a time; but here's my best:
Congratulations on the game by the way! It is impressive, even moreso that it's engineless.
P.S. Appreciated all the random sea-based pun names.
Thanks for beating the game & attempting to go for leaderboard! As of writing you hold the #1 Spot!
> I think there might be a check trying to stop me from drawing a path directly over land or a town
Yes there is a check to prevent "land-boating & hover-boating" and try prevent getting a ship stuck on a node. I should edit it so if a point hits there it just vanishes instead of nullifying the route :)
> Though there are some truly evil seeds in there
Seeds can be evil yea, but I do make a check to see that any run is beatable at boot! ( That being said there can also be blessed seeds ;) )
> Randomizing the ships on the other hand was interesting but a bit frustrating at times.
The ships are made using a normal distribution of statpoints between ( 10 - 50 ) the game randomly specs them into each stat, we wanted to make a proper shop updating over time and allow the user to pick a boat ( more statpoints would mean more expensive ) but couldn't in the remaining time-frame we had left when making the shop, so it just gives you a rng one for 100 coins.
We tried really hard to get the story & ambience to feel *just right* and are happy that this is paying off. <3
Glad you liked the game & thanks for the feedback! If you ever want to know more about engine-less gamedev feel free to contact me on Discord. <3
The fact that this was made in HTML, Svelte, Typescript is madness. Everything looks amazing and if you said it was using a "big 3" game engine I'd believe it. The ambience is also set pretty well. It's been mentioned before, but the ship speed is a bit slow. That's pretty much the only critique I have for this. Really innovative to use svelte for this, and I didn't know you could do that.
Thanks for playing <3
As a WebDev that couldn't figure out Godot, I appreciate the comment that it's good enough to be able to fool you into thinking it's one of the "big 3". Drastically lowered ship speed on the starter boat as we didn't want people to neglect buying ships, but in hindsight should have made the first ship a *bit* faster so you can get into the main game faster, and maybe make it only have a capacity of 10kg to balance it out. :D
Svelte 4 GameDev has a lot of awesome aspects, especially UI & state management with instantly reactive variables. Only pain-point is objects & arrays sometimes needing a manual ping to re-render. Oh and CSS; Transform translate, rotate & scale can be a nightmare. xd
Visuals and audio are really well-done; the first ship moving slowly was a bit annoying at first, but it really helps with the atmosphere of the whole experience and makes getting new ships that much more satisfying. Graphics and premise are also well-done and on-theme. Having voice acting for the old keeper was also a nice touch.
Controls could use a little bit of work, though - navigating the map before getting the zoom function is a touch too slow on mouse/keyboard in my opinion, and ships moving while in other interfaces makes it much more likely to accidentally crash, especially when transferring to/from the lighthouse. (Selecting a new ship to move it a touch closer to the lighthouse in order to load it up with gold, then selecting lighthouse while not realizing you still had the ship selected would often just send it happily sailing directly into the lighthouse, which was pretty frustrating while still learning the ropes of the game.)
I think I also ran into a bug. My ships would occasionally merge with one of the towns to the south and I couldn't drive them away - trying to click to select the ship just opened the town interface. I think this is because the ship got entirely overlapped by the "open town interface" area, but that still seems like something that shouldn't be happening.
Overall, good work! This seems like it has a lot of space to grow with some more time put into it, and I'd love to see how that goes if you go down that route.
Thanks for the feedback!
We are looking into possible solutions to make the user experience better & better whilst also keeping mobile cross-compatibility.
The zoom function unlocks after buying the an item for the first time, this was to prevent people getting overwhelmed at the start, there are 2 towns within a 1 second pan window of the lighthouse to buy from. A suggestion we will be adding to update #1 post jam is scroll-wheel click & WASD to look and pan the camera, and scroll to zoom. this should make PC exp better, also want a way to select boats without needing to click them.
> My ships would occasionally merge with one of the town
This is a bug we really want to fix in patch #1 yea,. we added extra padding to the boat's hit-box so you can at least click the sea in the corners next to the boat to regain control, but thats not a true fix.
I'm really happy where the team & I managed to get in the very short time span :D
Sounds like a good plan for moving forward.
And yeah, this is genuinely impressive, especially for engineless.
I really liked the visuals. The starting scene with the lighthouse is so cool. The fog effect was excellent. Even the supposedly crappy ship looked good. Sound effects were nice too as were the ambient sounds.
Recommendations:
- Let players move using WASD keys. Moving around the map was awkward with the mouse alone.
- It was difficult to land at ports as you would select them when trying to move there. Maybe make right click move the ship while left click only selects objects.
- Ship moves very slowly, I guess there are upgrades. But maybe make more events happen along the way.
- Background music was absent when I played.
It's a very bleak game, for me at least. I understand you went for a certain ambience and that is fine, but it can be a bit off putting for some of us.
Thanks for the feedback!
Glad you liked the visuals :D Props to the art team they did a great job! :)
We tried being as inclusive as possible and made everything mouse & touch-control's so its supported on mobile, update #1 post jam will be adding key-bind support for most common actions in game.
An alternative way of selecting node's & drawing paths does look like something we can look into. Right & Left click would work but worry that that would be confusing ( also how would we make a mobile alternative for those ), something we'll have to think about for sure.
Additional ships do make the game a lot faster, but I do agree it takes a while to get to that point.
Background music had a weird interaction with switching tabs whilst it's loading, still haven't figured out how / why fully. We can get it to stay 100% of the time whilst playing in & staying on page. There's 5 tracks 2 in Credits & Story & 3 during gameplay. Always with a 30second silence between them as requested by our sound guys :)
We went for a dark & somber vibe as it's post-apocalyptic flooded Europe, would you enjoy there be a "less sad option"? We have versions of the map that are more vibrant and could tone down the fog for that.
You could use a destination marker that's moved by clicking on the ship and dragging to the destination point. Not drag-clicking could then be used to select ports. That should work with touchscreens and mice.
I meant the tone, not the setting. The diary was intense. It's fine, if that's what you're aiming for. It's not a complaint, just feedback. I just thought you should know.
You think the dairy is intense enough to warrant some kind of trigger warning? If so I can look into adding that in the post jam update.
I couldn’t finish the game because my boat crashed into the lighthouse when I had a lot of money :( I thought it would stop like with the other ports but with the lighthouse, the ship kept running and it crashed. I was in the menu and just heard the boat breaking and after going out of the menu I got game over.
I liked the start of the game and the story. The journal is a great and nice touch of drawings like that in the right side of each entry.
The gameplay at 1st can feel a bit strange because if you don’t buy anything in the shop, you stay with no info about what to do or if you don’t store something in the lighthouse you don’t know about the next objective. At some point the player will buy something and leave stuff in the lighthouse since the boat can’t carry a lot at the start but for this I felt lost at the start, I didn’t buy anything and just went to wander into the sea.
I like how easy it is to get a lot of money, just buy-sell a lot of first aid and objects that cost 5 coins. I like the visuals and the music, it really fits the gloomy atmosphere of the story and the journey through the sea. (Or just keep buying-selling 1st aid in the 2 ports below the map and get a lot fast)
And, I’m not a person who tends to play this kind of game, that is a slow management game, so I’m not the best to say something about the game more than I felt it was slow for me haha. Maybe it can be relaxing or can be good to play if you have something else to watch on the side. (I’m writing this while I try to finish the game and for some reason in my second gameplay the music stopped, I tried to go to the lighthouse to store a few stuff and it happened again, it’s like the ships get into the lighthouse despite I parked far from it lol, well, if I have time after playing the list, I’ll try to finish the game)
But it’s amazing to see this game being made with web dev tools and running well, it’s magic.
Thanks for playing <3
The boats do stop at the lighthouse the tiny little rocks & islands around it are a minefield though xd.
Also make sure your boat is at a standstill and not selected when entering a building else it could drift away a bit.
The game should always let you know the next step after each quest item, if you have suggestions on new / extra lines & story points let me know. :)
Try buying a 2nd boat soon, this can prevent an early game-over and will make the game go exponentially faster! :D
Looking forward to see you beat the game and secure a place on the leaderboard. <3
Oooh, I see, next time I'll check my boat is standstill, I think because I click early the lighthouse did the drift into the earth haha, then tomorrow I'll try again!
And I'll let you know suggestions if I have them
Nice idea! The gameplay feels a bit slow IMO, I think it would improve to move the boat a little faster, and the mouse controls to be a little better (use the actual mouse position and wheel to move around the map and zoom)
Thank you for the feedback :D
Feel like it's mainly a balancing thing, we made the boats move at 10% their original speed as nobody was buying multiple boats when the first one was really fast. Story wise it's a cobbled together boat made by the old lighthouse keeper, any boat you buy from the lighthouse will be 2 to 3x faster than the first one.
Mouse wheel to zoom sounds like a good alternative feature we can add, we do want to keep it mobile compatible too. Using the mouse position to move around was conflicting a lot with the boat path drawing but can be looked at if we have more time :)
Do appreciate the feedback. <3
Very nice! 👍
Thank you :D
The HTML wizard has cast his most powerful spell yet, creating a masterpiece from thin air with the help of his apprentice's. Good job!!
One of them is even learning the dark arts of HTML gamedev itself! 🧙🏻
The team did a wonderful job. :D
I like it!
Glad you like it! <3
This was a neat idea. I thought the ambience was pleasing. I just thought it was rather slow and didn't have the time to play long enough to have enough boats. Good job for working without an engine. Hard work from all members!
Thanks for checking out the game, got any suggestions on the speed of the game?
We know it's a slow start; but buffing it made it useless to have multiple boats around.
The no-engine is something I did for pirate jam and has since become my signature :D Is a really fun challenge to push the base web to it's limits!
Loved the audio and the art! But had real trouble selecting things - either can't select a ship, or when I click somewhere by mistake - ship goes brr in that random position.
Nice job, but needs polishing.
Also, since it's becoming a tradition of me breaking Quinten's games, here's a guide on how to get a lot of coin in the beginning:
local-override game bundle, insert breakpoint at line as shown 1)
launch game, when breakpoint is reached, go few lines with 2) until you get to line 3)
change selling value of "Lighthouse Keeper" to whatever 4)
After dropping of lighthouse keeper, you'll get that amount of coin.
Run's using that coin method will not be validated for the scoreboard though!
Just wondering if at any point I'll make a HTML based game that you can't crack open XD, I'll keep trying :)
Thanks for checking out the game! :D