Seaway by Constantin

Seaway is an adventure game in which you explore islands and destroy ships in order to become the richest enslaver in the world.
Gather the many slaves lost in the islands and trade them for power ups in harbors to have an easier time destroying your rivals and looting their crew !
Or enter the peaceful mode and enjoy a nonviolent world, you can even use the auto pilot and let your ship venture by itself ...
Beware of the uprising !
Controls :
Left Click : Set target position
Right Click : Fire
Scroll wheel : Change current weapon
Space : Screenshot
P : Toggle peaceful mode
A : Toggle auto pilot
Made by :
Constantin Liétard Thomas Denis Louis Valet Maxime Catel

| Windows | https://borderline.itch.io/seaway |
| Linux | https://borderline.itch.io/seaway |
| macOS | https://borderline.itch.io/seaway |
| HTML5 (web) | https://borderline.itch.io/seaway |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/seaway |
Ratings
| Given | 17🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
(Minor bug: your ammunition text renders behind islands)
Currently I'm working on a game that is trying to achieve this terraced-land-effect and I was wondering if you would be interested in connecting to talk about how you achieved it? It's truly lovely. :)

- Some of the game information would be nice in game, like controls or that there is the possibility to upgrade or change weapons. Not that I found where to upgrade or what other weapons existed, I found what I thought it could be a harbor, but nothing happened there.
- The combat is a bit frustrating, everything goes too fast and I need to aim and move to opposite directions. Not easy with only one mouse.
- Were this game truly shines is in the exploration department, the world looks stunning and looks varied thanks to color changes. I would like to see a game like this expanded.I realized reading that there is a peaceful mode, well that mode is a 100%.
- I almost forgot, the music! Wow!
One of my favorites so far.
The only issue I had were that the shop would not always register my clicks
Minor improvements would probably be needed on pathfinding (the ship would sometimes do a 360 upon assigning a new target up ahead) and collision of the islands^^
I loved the music and the combat system was pretty simple to handle.
As the others says the pathfinding is a bit off sometimes.
I wish there was more islands to discover haha !
Anyway it was really relaxing to play, solid entry guys !
I did notice sometimes it didn't register my clicks for movement however and after a while of playing it my frame-rate started to drop. I could see this becoming a full game and it's one i would defiantly purchase good job guys
The gameplay itself is pretty solid as well, but the controls feel a bit clunky and sometimes the ship just doesn't go where I want it to go, it feels like the ship has an own mind :D
On the harbors I had a hard time buying upgrades, because it only purchased speed or bullet speed after I spam clicked it for a while
But these are just some complaints, other than that it's been a really awesome experience
I never thought a game with slavery at its core could be so fun. Great work!
@marcmagus Seems like I got confused while zipping, trying to fix that asap
Great job.
Once the stream is finished you can find the video here: https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos
If you want to know when it was played you can find your game in the queue here: https://tinyurl.com/y5rdokvp
Be cool to see a hard mode that has wind direction.
The land visuals reminds me of an mobile game that you are a God trying to expand your people territory and so on...
Congratulations on the game
the game had an abundance of features and the attention to detail was amazing
wish there were more shops, and getting the hang of the game was a bit hard at first, but overall its an absolutely amazing game
And then I read the description and found out that those logs that I was collecting all the time were actually slaves! They looked like logs, they made log sounds upon pickup, hell, I still believe they are logs! This all slave thing really contradicts the overall style and relaxing feel of the game, but I guess it's just a joke from the developer.
Overall, really great job. You guys make me jealous.
Because of the clunk-ish controls, the inclusion of autopilot and peaceful mode is great. Cool to just watch shit and feel like you're exploring
Loved the "exploration" mode, it's really awesome. Good job !
Could not buy anything at the port, and auto-pilot is not worth much, unfortunately
Kept doing those screenshots, though... :)
There are a few bugs like the boat doing a 360° rotation and sometimes going through walls, but overall it's pretty amazing. Bien joué!
The biggest issue I have is the subject matter, I understand that the theme lends itself quite well to using slavery as a core story element but I think that the issue lies in the approach of addressing an issue with as much history and human suffering as slavery. Those aspects aren't addressed at all in the gameplay, or the game at all as far as I could tell which is a real shame because games are a fantastic way to explore those difficult topics. I look to Spec Ops: The Line and Papers Please as great examples of games that look at different aspects of our society and explore them in a meaningful and tasteful way. Even in peaceful mode you still enslave the island natives, the counter doesn't show up but they fly to your boat. I feel that was a huge missed opportunity.
Thank you for entering this, I hope learned as much making this as I did making the game I worked on.
Pour pinailler, je dirais que le cam shake est un peu violent.
Je me suis pas mal baladé mais je n'ai pas trouvé de port... Est-ce qu'il y a un moyen de savoir où aller?
Et techniquement ça marche bien... C'est du Houdini injecté dans Unity ?
Gotta agree with @BabyKing about the subject matter, and the missed opportunity, but I was able to enjoy the game regardless.
One complaint! The white cursor would get lost in the white part of the screen, and I'd panic for a moment that my mouse was gone and I couldn't mind it.
This is the most beautiful game I've seen so far, and the peaceful auto pilot mode was very soothing.
I don't like the manual control of the ship though, the navigation is very unpredictable and hard to understand. And I feel the progression should be lengthened a bit. In my experience by the time you buy 1 or 2 powerups you're practically the god of the sea already.
Overall I love it a lot (4.5/5), but more as a piece of art than a game <3
One other thing though, i don't see how the theme fits here that much. Otherwise you've done a really good job.
How is it, this game is not already on Steam or any other Store? :smile:
Like a few other people have said I found the slave thing a bit odd, and thought I was collecting planks of wood, which made sense in my mind as constituting the "life" or "health" of my ship, whereas being destroyed because I run out of slaves doesn't make much sense to me. On the other hand, trading planks of wood for weapons probably wouldn't make a lot of sense either... :shrug:
The slave ships used to transport people to the americas were quite different. Terrible conditions, and very high mortality rate, they were only interested in how much money they could make by packing as many slaves they could into each trip.
Edit: Sometimes there is too litle action and I saw a shop only once(maybe I didn't see it, so make it more viable)...
-at a certain point the projectiles just don't appear anymore
-sometimes the slaves cannot be taken from the islands
-can't control cannon in auto-pilot, it just stays there glithcing around
-sometimes the player's boat ignores the collisions and compenetrates inside isles
But overall a good game
This is one of, if not the best entry I've played so far, congratulations !
It's amazing, seriously.
The damage upgrade could maybe be nerfed a little bit. At my first port i got the broadside cannon (which was fun to use) with a couple damage upgrades. From then on I one shot everything.
But yeah, the theme vs vibe mismatch was a bit strong.
There are some bugs with the movement and the precision in the aiming that keep anoying me while fighting other ships but everything else is awesome.
However as someone said in another comment, I don't think such matters as slavery should be treated this lightly. If you were trying to denounce it, a game jam game focused on gameplay was clearly insufficient to do it well. If not, maybe it would be time to think about how, as game developers, what we develop impacts the world around us. I also understand how the ludum theme could lead you to this idea but why not make a game where you free slaves instead ?
I liked how you guided me in start by having just empty space and need to try out the controls. That’s really nice way of teaching the game mechanics to player. But after enemies were introduced the gameplay became bit hard too fast. I wish that same kind of guidance was used here too. Maybe ramp the difficulty bit slower? Those bigger ships were really hard. And on my second play I realized that there were collectables on the islands. They were kinda hard to spot, especially in frenzy of the combat. And I never found any harbours.
All in all perfect atmosphere, everything was nicely done and well polished. Amazing entry altogether!
I love the boat trail as well, any hint how it is done ?
I am going to second what others have been saying above regarding slavery - I can totally appreciate how it relates to the theme - but I think it's just a very sensitive subject matter for a game jam, particularly when it's presented in such a trivialising way. For example, aliens invading and enslaving the human race would be less problematic than a stylised depiction of an idealised swashbuckling perspective on the Atlantic Slave Trade. I know you're not endorsing Slavery™️ with this game, but I think it's a missed opportunity - we should use our powers as game makers for good!
Yeah otherwise completely excellent work! - looking forward to seeing your next LD entry!
Art and music are really beaultiful and create an atmosphere.The gameplay is fine.
I'm not sure if there's an end goal to the game... I wish it didn't reset you to 0 after death (bit too punishing and demotivating). And finally, it's missing bullet trail feedback once my bullet speed exceeds a certain value. Other than those things I absolutely adore this game and I sure had a great time playing!
The controls themselves at a bit difficult at times: shooting and moving at the same time is a bit of a different combo than usual. The big boats are rather nasty in the beginning too :P
With such a peaceful/pretty look the 'slave' mechanism feels a bit out of place. Perhaps picking up cast-aways? :D
I mentioned 2 spontaneous bugs:
1- When the boat keeps spinning instead of going to desired position at times
2- The water is on top of the boat sometimes at the start of the game.
Its cool and fun, but when you start out I found it hard to rise my score(slaves) up before getting killed
Maybe in future if you have time, some kind of tutorial with maybe some tips on the game would be cool too.
Also additional more fluent movement would be preffered like the guy above said, during fights, its hard to control everything with only a mouse, just an option of WASD there would be great.
Generally speaking I enjoyed it!
- It's difficult to see the population on islands. Maybe that's intended, but often I felt like I was only encountering empty islands when there was actually tiny dots of roughly the same color to gather. It's mostly a problem on your first run, since there's nothing indicating what you should do.
- I quickly seemed to run out of things to do. I enabled auto pilot which led me to bigger enemy ships, which is pretty cool, but I still couldn't really see the objective. I never saw any ports where I could trade my "currency"; collecting and battling feel good but there doesn't seem to be benefits?
- Maybe add an HP bar to the ship? Or something to indicate permanent damage (smoke, etc.), if it is permanent.
- The ship spins around once when asked to go straight ahead.
- Edit: I kept playing so that I could find a port. They're very rare so I think people might miss them, but the mechanism is nice. Beware of font sizes though: it's difficult to see item names (in white!) when not playing fullscreen.
Looks great, interesting visuals.
A friend sent me the link and I was pleased with the quality until i saw it was also a submission to the jam, and said out loud "are you kidding me??" because i could not believe you achieved such a polished style in 3 days.
Awesome work!
I think the only thing that was tough was finding the upgrade ports. Was looking around quite a bit for those but couldn't seem to find them very well.
Keep up the great work, would love to see this game continued!
Here is a video of me playing the game the other day:
[Seaway by Constantin's Team](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/420803800)