These might at first glance look suspiciously like blocks, but they are, I assure you, boats.

The core of the game is courageously sailing our little blocky boat about the oceans, discovering new lands and setting up trade routes. As we explore, we set up fleet of automatically controlled cargo ships which sail between continents and islands ferrying supplies and trade goods. Cargo vessels can only travel so far before they need to restock, but only certain islands can resupply them. A large part of the game will be discovering new resupply points and using these to chain together islands into long trade routes.

At this point the game consists of a small archipelago and a few boats which wander aimlessly (and, with no respect for decency or proper collision detection, occasionally sail straight through solid rock).

I was originally going to use one terrain grid for the whole world, but I decided to have each island be a separate chunk of terrain. This gives me a bit more control over placement, and it speeds up rendering. I sank more time than I intended into terrain generation (and I imagine I’ll be sucked into that again before the game is done).

The most fun part so far was setting up the player’s boat and attaching a squishy chase camera to it. I’m trying for a sense of speed without making the distances between islands too small. Vrooom!