Shipwright Shore

Why I built it

Shipwright Shore started as a joke. I was done with Netflix and I saw the kids playing Minecraft. I wanted to see if I could make a slightly more realistic block world for the phone. After a few days it looked like something, and it became a game of its own with a clear goal: build a ship and get off the island.

It's also an experiment outside my own field. As a backend developer without serious game experience, I'm the helmsman: AI writes the C# code, I set the course, review and steer. The whole story is in A game that started as a joke.

The solution

A blocky survival game with a way out: the ship you build yourself.

• A ship as the goal, built part by part on your own beach.
• Crafts that build on each other: first flint and fiber, then bronze, then iron. No plank without a saw.
• Earning the sea, one boat at a time: a raft, a rowboat and more.
• Survival with hunger, thirst, warmth and sleep, with rain, wind and a fossa beyond the light of your fire.
• Water that flows and floods, and structures that collapse when the support is missing.
• A castaway with commentary who simply points out what isn't realistic, with humor in the style of Monkey Island, and a scene of its own for every way he can die.
• Phone and desktop: touch with two thumbsticks (left-handed too), keyboard and mouse, or a gamepad.
• Fully offline: no ads, no accounts, no tracking and no in-game purchases.

Under the hood

The game has no folder of drawings. Every texture is a recipe of color and noise that gets computed at startup, every island grows from a seed (the same seed always gives the same world), and the animals, the boats and Jonah himself are built from blocks in code. Sound effects are synthesized; the music is composed in code while you play and sounds through a single General MIDI sound bank, GeneralUser GS.

Water flows by its own rules, every block knows what holds it up, and Jonah walks on physics of his own instead of the engine's. The game rules live in plain C# libraries outside Godot and are tested without the engine. Chunks are meshed on worker threads, outside the frame, so it keeps running smoothly on a phone too.

Status

In development for Android via Google Play and for Windows and Linux via Steam. Everything about the game, with images and the press kit, is on lengthofrope.nl. The Play page is online, but the game can't be installed there yet; the Steam page follows later. Built with ANVIL, with by now more than fifteen hundred recorded architecture decisions.