ramsey nasser / 2025-11-13

Today's progress is on a new kind of boat -- friendlies! They represent refugees making the Mediterranean crossing or flotillas bound for Gaza. They spawn outside the zone and try and cross -- your job is to make sure that they do! Police and other baddies will try and stop them.

There's a version of this game that is just a smash-em-up and maybe that's what it ends up being. But I want to explore the slightly richer mechanics I originally sketched out to confirm or deny their value. The basic idea is that you have:

Yachts: main objective, destroying them gives you health and points
Enemies: (police boats, helicopters) they exist to try and kill you, destroy them before they destroy you. They increase in number over time, making things more difficult
Friendlies: (refugees, flotillas): secondary objective, help them make the crossing without being destroyed by enemies. Each successful crossing gives you solidarity.
Allies: (giant squid, anarchist ghosts, seagulls, baltimore shooter): powerful allies you can call in to attack enemies alongside you, function as "superweapons" in a conventional shmup. Can be called in when you have enough solidarity.

Is that too much? Should this just be a simple smashing game with just yachts and enemies? I don't know! The process will tell me. The current prototype plan is to make one of each which would represent a complete albeit minimal version of the system and test that. I am not sure which ally to build though -- any favorites?

Full thing here. Refresh for new path! If you refresh enough you can get some difficult terrain which forces the algorithm to move the friendly and retry -- its pretty cool.