Connect trade routes across the Atlantic to join the Old World to the New. Build up your trade company to make great profits - but watch out for pirates!
MAKE SURE TO USE NODES TO DRAW TRADE ROUTES!
Controls: MOUSE for most things. ARROW KEYS/CLICK AND DRAG to scroll. MOUSE WHEEL to zoom (or Q and A). Click and Drag from Node to Node to make Trade Routes
Buy white trade ships to earn money, unlock ports with yellow explorer ships, and take out nasty pirates with red privateers.
Pirates are invisible, so pay attention, listen out and check where your boats disappear. Sending a red privateer to that waypoint will clear those salty dogs - be warned, each privateer is one use only!
Each port has wealth indicated by the red level next to it - the higher the red, the more profitable the port.
We really didn't have time to balance this, but it's a fun little almost sandbox game!
See if you can unlock every port and connect the world!
We didn't manage to completely fix the scrolling issue in a webpage - so if this affects you please use the Windows link.
Fun game! Pirates were annoying in that I would try to send a trade route to the new world but a pirate would kill it and I wouldn't know the exact path I took. I don't see much harm in showing where pirates have attacked? Great work overall with art and sound.
Thanks for the suggestion Iiamere, we did have some discussion about pirates and weren't sure exactly how we ought to do them. As it is the idea is that you need to watch to see where the ship goes missing, then send a privateer to take out the pirate. Might not be especially balanced so possibly more frustrating than fun, thanks for feedback!
Awesome game! Took a little bit to work out exactly how to create the routes but once I got that down the game took off! Great gameplay, graphics and idea.
Very cool art and music! It was a bit unplayable though. Still nice!
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obskyr27 Aug 2014, 19:07
Samuel here! A wee bit disappointed with the name, nudge nudge, but oh wow it turned out well. It's really fun!
It should probably be a bit easier to send out privateers. Drawing a route all the way from Bristol feels a bit unnecessary when their route often doesn't matter at all. And there being no way to keep track of pirate attacks? That's just a pain.
Overall, though, I've had a load of fun building my trading empire and I'm so glad I decided to stop by both for the dev and the actual game! Great job!
Pretty impressive little blitz-trading game. Struggles a bit in Pepperflash, but visually nice an impressive! Only thing was took a while to figure out exactly how to get the ships moving between ports - didn't realise you had to map it from node to node. Pretty cool job all round!
Thanks Samuel, we did consider a number of your suggestions, haha. Thanks for all the feedback everyone! You're right DragonXVI, if we'd playtested properly we;d have found out that the nodes aren't very clear, and would have maybe made the path 'snap' to nodes easily.
I think this is the base of a great game incoming. I like micromanagement a lot already so I would love to see this become something bigger than this. With more upgrades and interaction. Graphics are not my style but they fit each other.
It gets boring if you have full 'better gold' and 'faster ships', and I got that with 8 ports. :) The menus were all so big, as if they were designed for touching, for clicking maybe smaller buttons would be faster to use?
Also im confused: it seemed possible to make trading routes go through multiple ports, but they only get money once?
commodoreKid - I'd love to keep working on this game, we had so many stretch goals we'd have loved to have put in if we'd had longer so we got lots of ideas!
Dr - we didn't have much time to balance, so it's not too hard! Good point about the menus. And you're right about ships going through ports - they can be used as waypoints, its only the end and start that matter!
Took me quite a while to figure out how to direct ships to their destination.
Once i did, this was a lot of fun. Love that you managed to put the upgrade-system in. Gives you a goal to play for. It was maybe a bit easy to make money, i never had to actually do a transatlantic trade route, lots of small ones in europe already make silly amounts of money with the side-effect of not having to bother too much with pirates.
Those are just small balancing-issues though, the idea and excecution for an LD-game is fantastic. Like the visuals, too.
Thanks Lars and markus (glad you liked the art, drop shadows make things much sexier!) You're right Lars, it all needed balancing, like to reduce the amount of money you get from Europe and to entice you to make trades with America, but glad you liked the foundation!
Really awesome game! My one crit would be that the popup confirmations tend to get a bit invasive - it might be better to do something like build this into the route dragging, so that the cost of sending the particular ship shows at your cursor position and updates as you drag. Nice work!
Thanks SK16! Retro - I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean. When you make a trade route the distance and gold of that route does appear at your cursor position! Although maybe you're right that we didn't need the pop up, as the information about how much it will cost is already there.
Not seeing pirates (or at least were I encountered pirates) is a bit annoying. It feels random AND too punishing. When you have a lot of trade routes, you may not remember what the one who just got destroyed was.
Nice audio and map. It would have been great to have an introductory tutorial, but I get that may have been out of scope for the jam. You could even turn it into a game with different levels. Make a post-compo version!
The graphics are great for a game like this. The menu, ships, sea, land are all the same nice style. Nice music. Good job for making a strategic game in this short amount of time.
A lose condition would have been nice. The game continued without trade routes and money which is pointless. And I'm not sure about the pirate mechanism. It works, but is a bit weird with not seeing anything.
congrats on the entry. i wanted to really love this game, the graphics are nice, ts pretty polished, but i had to really click around all over the place to figure out that dublin is all i could play with. i think some UI tweaks and playability fixes could make this really fun
The interface and overall art of this game looks great, the music and sounds are fitting. As mentioned in your postmortem the controls are difficult at times, and the gold income isn't very balanced. I saw pirates invade my ports twice in the 16 minutes I played.
Comments44
Very good job!
The path node system is very well made.
Love the graphic shapes
It should probably be a bit easier to send out privateers. Drawing a route all the way from Bristol feels a bit unnecessary when their route often doesn't matter at all. And there being no way to keep track of pirate attacks? That's just a pain.
Overall, though, I've had a load of fun building my trading empire and I'm so glad I decided to stop by both for the dev and the actual game! Great job!
The menus were all so big, as if they were designed for touching, for clicking maybe smaller buttons would be faster to use?
Also im confused: it seemed possible to make trading routes go through multiple ports, but they only get money once?
But forget that, nice game!
Dr - we didn't have much time to balance, so it's not too hard! Good point about the menus. And you're right about ships going through ports - they can be used as waypoints, its only the end and start that matter!
Once i did, this was a lot of fun. Love that you managed to put the upgrade-system in. Gives you a goal to play for. It was maybe a bit easy to make money, i never had to actually do a transatlantic trade route, lots of small ones in europe already make silly amounts of money with the side-effect of not having to bother too much with pirates.
Those are just small balancing-issues though, the idea and excecution for an LD-game is fantastic. Like the visuals, too.
Nice work!
Retro - I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean. When you make a trade route the distance and gold of that route does appear at your cursor position! Although maybe you're right that we didn't need the pop up, as the information about how much it will cost is already there.
The graphics are great for a game like this. The menu, ships, sea, land are all the same nice style.
Nice music.
Good job for making a strategic game in this short amount of time.
A lose condition would have been nice. The game continued without trade routes and money which is pointless.
And I'm not sure about the pirate mechanism. It works, but is a bit weird with not seeing anything.
And I've also played other games of yours, 10 second army is quite amazing :)
I recorded my playthough of this, it will be uploaded to my channel on Monday the 15th. http://www.youtube.com/user/Ythmevge