Arr matey! It's time for you to gather your crew, board the Coalheart, and set sail for the rich trade routes of the Bermuda Triangle. Find those laden merchants by the sound of their chanties, then give them a taste of your thermal ray or your broadside cannons. Send them to the depth, and be sure to get their loot on board before it too sinks. Once your hold is as full as can be, head back to your home port to cash in your prize.

But be careful. There's something dark in these waters. And it has a taste for blackhearted pirate souls. Like a shark, it will follow the smell of your blood through the water, getting ever hungrier and faster. But you're no frightened landlubber. And besides, there's an old sea dog's trick: The one thing these eldritch horrors like chasing more than your pirate ship are dark souls offered to it in sacrifice. So find yourself some "volunteers" amongst your crew members and have them walk the plank. Of course, whomever your sacrifice won't be doing his job no more, so your ship's performance will suffer in some way. But the Coalheart can get by on a skeleton crew if need be. And on the bright side, dead man don't get their cut from the loot.

Well, I finished the game, just barely. It doesn't nearly have all the features I wanted to implement (like decent Merchant AI that fights back, lookout-crewmembers that show you indicators to merchant ships, or even a start menu), but I hope you'll have some fun playing it nonetheless.

The game was made by me, Bificommander, in Unity. It uses some standard Unity assets, and a collection of free sound effects.

Press Esc for a list of controls. The game ends when you die or when you return to the green homebase that you start at. Note that for the final score, the amount of loot you collected and remaining HP are counted, but the number of crew members you sacrificed is not. Can you make it to the Dread Pirate rating?

Post-jam update: I put in an hour or two of extra work to polish the game up slightly. It now has the in-game UI that I removed because it wasn't done, has some changes to the map that prevent you or the merchants from getting stuck so easily, plus some minor interface tweaks. It is definitely the game experience I recommend, but if you want to be strict with your rating, the original is what I finished by the Jam deadline.

Post-jam update 2: I tried making a web version of my game, with some of the feedback in mind (notably trying to reduce the drifting a bit). While I was at it, I also modified it to serve as a Sinterklaas-surprise (think Secret Santa), which is why the loot and chanties are different, and what the Present hint refers to. I hid no presents in your houses, but you can still play the web version. There does seem to be a bug that occasionally makes the loot pickup not work, but I haven't been able to replicate it within Unity and haven't found a fix.