🧭💔

(Created in ~36 hours for the Kenney and Melon jams with the themes "connection" and "flow" respectively.)

Objective:

Connect the different harbours with your ships. You must successfully complete 5 trips between each colored pair to advance to the next puzzle. There are currently 6 levels to solve.

Gameplay:

Use your mouse to drag arrows to create flows in the water for the ships to navigate.

Credits:

* Design and programming: Josep Valls.

* Music and SFX by checkpoint: https://ch3ckpo1nt.com/

* All the visuals come from different Kenney asset packs, specifically:

https://kenney.nl/assets/isometric-landscape (background 2D tileset)

https://kenney.nl/assets/watercraft-kit (ships)

https://kenney.nl/assets/minigolf-kit (flags)

https://kenney.nl/assets/tower-defense-kit (harbours)

https://kenney.nl/assets/board-game-icons (UI & tutorial)

https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack (UI & tutorial)

https://kenney.nl/assets/particle-pack (effects)

With some minor recoloring on the ships, flags and harbours.

Source code:

* I will pack the source code and make it available once uploads are enabled again.

Bonus challenges:
2. No text: Create a game that doesn't use any text at all.
3. Mouse only: Your game should be fully controlled using only the mouse.
6. Cross Dimensional: I used 3D objects in a 2D world.

TODO list:

I started exploring so many ideas and mechanics but eventually ran out of time. This is a non-comprehensive list of some of the low-hanging fruit I may try to implement in a follow-up.

* Wind flow. The original name was "wind and waves". I have all the systems in place but I ran into a couple issues and had to backtrack it. The idea is that you can set big fans/windmills on the shore to create air currents. Ships with a sail will ignore the water current and follow wind currents. This mechanic led to some fun puzzles where ships would travel in opposite directions in the same waterway (you still had to account for blockings)

* Obstacles. I was using the buoys to create temporary obstacles in the maps. They didn't look great. I have some ideas on how to render them better.

* Puzzle progression. Puzzles would present the different harbours over time (like in mini-metro).

* Time pressure. Again, inspired by mini-metro/mini-motorways, each location had a timeout that needed to be satisfied for the trip to count.

* Story. I had all this story planned where a flood separated two lovers in adjacent villages and now relied on ship's to mail love letters to each other. I had sketches for the storytelling without any text but again, limited time.

* Background decorations. There are plenty of 2D and 3D assets that could decorate the background. I had the palm trees and rocks from the pirates pack almost ready to go. I also wanted to add smoke from the tugboats and animate the oars.

* More puzzles.

Cheating:

There is a little cheat for that. If you press the key "v" on your keyboard a little button shows on the top-right corner that lets you skip a level.

Known issues:

* The cheating option above has an issue that if it's used in the tutorial level, the title will not be hidden and will occlude the gameplay area. Again, something I had fixed in my local build but forgot to upload.

* The water ripple effect is too high. Also, I just need to reupload.

Any other issues or ideas? Leave a comment below!