Skullduggery
I made this in April 2023 in under a month as a challenge to myself. It's built in Unity, with most of the emphasis on the screen-space shaders I wrote, the sailing mechanics, and the trading mechanics. You can download and play it for free here:
https://jack-morehart.itch.io/skullduggery
Game Design Notes:
Gameplay is centered around four islands, and the dangerous trade routes between them. Each passage is meant to be risky. Clouds make navigation difficult, concealing rocks, islands, and pirates.
The main game loop consists of buying a commodity and finding a port that will pay you a premium for it.
The progression system is fairly simple: more money lets you buy larger amounts of cargo, which will yield you more money.
https://jack-morehart.itch.io/skullduggery
Game Design Notes:
Gameplay is centered around four islands, and the dangerous trade routes between them. Each passage is meant to be risky. Clouds make navigation difficult, concealing rocks, islands, and pirates.
The main game loop consists of buying a commodity and finding a port that will pay you a premium for it.
The progression system is fairly simple: more money lets you buy larger amounts of cargo, which will yield you more money.
After the player has 10x'ed their starting money, they can buy a bigger ship that is faster, carries more cargo, and is far more survivable. The last, most expensive ship is essentially a win state, meant to strike fear into the hearts of the roaming pirates.
Tech Art Notes:
The visuals are built principally around a Sobel filter, and then a simple sea-shader that I wrote in HLSL and ShaderLab.
This was expanded upon with some clouds, and shadows, and finally a map, also included in the same shader.
I used compute shaders for this, which was shortsighted, as unity's webgl implementation doesn't presently support them.