The goal of Dare Islands is to goal the red boats into the red goal zone and the green boats into the green goal zone. The boats cannot be controlled directly, but the water currents can be changed by growing and removing islands. The left mouse button grows and and the right one removes it. If the boats hit land or enter the wrong goal zone, then a life is used. The game requires .NET 3.5 Framework and some CPU speed. The code was done with F# and the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (with the F# plugin) as the IDE. The fluid simulation is a simple implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). Sources are included in the main package. If the direct download link doesn't work, try downloading from the website.
Very inventive gameplay, nicely thematic. Bonus points for being high-tech and using ML. :) The game's pretty hard. My best strategy was to write off mixed groups of boats and trap them in lagoons without killing them, though it was hard to predict when they'd become "stuck" and die. I think it would have been better if the two colors of boats had different physical properties so it was possible to separate groups, or somehow to regain lives, because otherwise the game is always getting into a higher-entropy state. But I guess it is a physics game. :)
The mechanics are very cool, but the game doesn't have a lot of variety with time. Some variety in what you have to handle or check points to give a sense of accomplishment would've been nice.
Wow, that's an awesome idea, and a neat piece of technology. Definitely one of the more creative games around. I ended up funneling all traffic into one small area and selectively built/destroyed a "gate" island to deflect the boats depending on the color.
"Cool idea! 5 stars for innovation! :D"