Got a highscore of 10581! Really fun addition to the jame with many components to make every playthrough unique. The only con is slight unresponsiveness to clicking certain parts of the ship to repair.

Fun game! The art is great, the music is super fitting and peaceful, and the gameplay is simple and easy to pick up. Nice to see a lighthearted take on the theme too!

This is a really cool game. The mechanic is very clever and it's nice to ship evolve as you build. Also the art is beautiful. Nice job!

Gave this one five stars across the board! I had a blast constructing my ship and watching it go, definitely has pretty strong QWOP vibes.

If I had to suggest one feature/mechanic change, I would make it so that when parts break, you have to replace them with a different part altogether, so that your ship evolves as it goes along and you have to change tactics between maximizing floating/flying/speed

Made it to 9663 meters! Really liked the art style, and how the boat pieces fit together. I would have liked to see more difficult tasks as the journey went along.

Howl's Floating Castle XD


I made a boat! Love the art style and connecting those bits and bobs together, very well done!

Wow this was awesome! I love the art style, and how it fits the theme. and building onto the boat was so much fun. At first I thought I beat the system and made the boat go forever, but then it broke down on me and I was too late to fix it. What a great time! lol

This is one of the most fun games so far! I love the mechanic and the art and just everything!
My high score was 4700. I wonder how much better I could do

Heads up though! If you press "D" on the main menu a bunch of debug info shows up ;)

This game was really relaxing and fun! The whole vibe was great, just sailing your boat with relaxing music and a nice atmosphere.

Like other commenters, I also thought that I had managed to game the system with this monstrosity of a boat, but suddenly found myself sinking quickly and had to rethink my strategy. I thought that I had a good system, but then I saw other folks in the comments with scores in the 10,000s, so I guess I have more learning to do! :)


I loved how you pan the camera across the boat as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, that was a really nice touch!

I Loved the music and art style

The art style with the building sounds really makes this game feel nice :paintbrush:

Love the artstyle, the look of the different components and the way that they mesh together! I would love to see this idea expanded with with a quest-like unlock system that opens up unique components.

Cool design, very nice colors. Had a nice meditation under these steam-sails, much appreciated!

Nicely done game with pleasant art, relaxing gameplay and great music. That is all i need. Well done!

Absolutely gorgeous art style, and a lot of content to explore.
It's impressive how "organic" the modular boat designs look, as if everything belonged in its place. Bravo!

Awesome! The art is fantastic and goes well with the music to give great vibes. It's nice to see the modules change based on whats around them. Would be fun to remove the size restriction. Maybe more modules in the future (autorepair) ? The only little downside to me is that at some point you have nothing to do apart from reparing modules that break down in seconds.

Great entry!

This game is soooo cool!
Loved the Howl aesthetics, the concept, and the music too :smiley:
Felt a bit long in the end but the final part where you realize you'll never see your boat float again was so heartbreaking, totally worth it.

Woha! and incredible game for a LD! your art is so impresive (it is not easy to make ilustrations that works so fine in 72h!) and the gameplay is simple but so much effective! good idea and good execution! 9.5/10.

The Gilbi-esc art style with the pastelly background really made this game for me. The music complemented it as well. Only gripe is that sometimes the bits go through stages before the hammer comes up and it is hard to tell if they're on the way out. Other than that I loved this game, thanks :)

Stunning artwork, fitting music! I also love the building gameplay, though for me it could do away with the clicking for repairs - just designing a ship and perhaps defining a priority order for the repairs would be better - I'd prefer just watching the ship sail over frantic clicking, especially with the calming aesthetic.

I derived a great amount of joy from making the most stupid looking ship possible. Very entertaining. Good game!

So cool graphics. And very nice gameplay

Seems like design idea, but for me 3 columns is not enough :(

Thank you for a great game!

Extremely chill game, wonderful music and exquisite art! Thank you for this gem, we've played it quite a few times to try and find the best combination.

Awesome little game. Nice building mechanic.

I had a great time playing the game, it has a very nice mood. The possibilities makes it so engaging. Great entry.

Solid entry that feels very polished! I enjoyed every minute of it. Now I wonder what the best build would be. Can you stack the boilers to get more power out of them?


Amazing little game, absolutely loved the modulation! Great Idea and execution!

-Tim

Fun stuff :)
I like the art style and the simplistic but addicting gameplay, also got a chuckle out of watching the camera pan down underwater on failing, and seeing just how ridiculously tall the boat got.
Good game

Being able to customise your own ship is soooo cool ! good job ! :thumbsup:

Loved the atmosphere, feels relaxing and fun, while actually making you notice defects on the ship and thinking what's the best way to build and progress. Cool submissions, good job!

Great entry! The art was amazing and I had a lot of fun testing different builds. Good job! :v:

Great survival game! Straightforward, yet very entertaining take on the theme, supported by a fun system, gorgeous art, and cool audio.

Strengths:
- Beautiful to watch and listen to
- Invokes the charm of great incremental games
- Additions are simples enough that their purpose is immediately understandable

Possible improvements:
- I wish I could pay to remove some parts...or I might just be a terrible ship-builder...

Great job!

You don't need to hear it from me, but this was awesome! Well done. My only complaint is that I couldn't really tell what was breaking other than my cursor would change to the hand instead of pointer.

I got to a distance of 20706m! I did it with a very small boat, with only one engine, a balloon, a propellor and a few fins. Not the most interesting run, but definitely got me very far :P

This game was really amazing. The really cute and pretty art, together with beautiful music and a very smooth gameplay made for a very relaxing and fun game. Everything felt super polished, and there was nothing to break the immersion. I really felt like some kind of crazy adventurerer that was making his own boat as he sailed. The only minor complaint I was that it sometimes was a bit difficult to see whether a part was broken or not, especially the bases. The hammer appeared on it after a while, which helped. This is truely a very nitpicky point though.

Really amazingly done! I had a lot of fun with this!

Best boat building game all jam! :stuck_out_tongue: Honestly I really liked it a lot. Putting together a wacky boat and then watching it sink after a few kilometers was really fun. Interesting concept. I loved seeing all the text on the side. My favorite piece of info was "debug = true".

Great game! I really enjoyed this and it worked quite well on mobile as well so kudos for that!

I really like the art style and the music, and seeing my boat sail the endless sea is fun. Great work!

Haha awesome title for that game, and it was a pretty beautiful experience overall, reminds of FAR. Very interesting, great job

Great game, really fun and has really nice art

Nice game, I really like the art and music!

Love the concept, it's a great take on the theme. The art style is really charming, great work there especially. Now if only I could find a more optimized build...


The art is beautiful it reminded me of Don't Starve Together and the game felt really cozy (even tho our destiny is eminent death ;c ) the SFX were on point.

Its beautiful, I especially like what you did with the background, moduls are great too, really nice entry, great job.

Nice style and really fun idea, it's really fun to build this improbable bulk of a boat. However I tried to put only sails and it seemed to work a little bit too well ? I stopped that run after 3 minutes but I don't what would have stopped me to continue indefinitely ?

Playful art aesthetic and bright, happy sound and music. I liked the detail in the art, in-between animations, and how you treated buoyancy. I normally wouldn't have played this type of game but I'm glad I did because I actually played it quite a while, enough to get up to 20k's before I let the repairs eat me up.

Lovely game!

Lovely game. I ended up with a fairly simple, sturdy boat that didn't need much maintenance, so eventually just let it sink .

Very relaxing artstyle and music for the game. The gameplay is simple and kind of zen-inducing in its simplicity, and it gives the game a very strong mood overall. I did initially think that the sound effect indicating stuff was breaking was just duck quack SFX as ambience, and got confused when my big ship started sinking. After two fails, though, I understood what was going on and managed to make it to 10k. Overall, very nice entry.

I really liked the art/audio and the overall aesthetic of the game. Nice work.

That's totally inspired by Howl’s Floating Castle! Loved it!

An interesting game. I liked the visual graphics and music. Good Job :)

Very good music) really fits overall style

Had to try several builds, how they can combine and try to get the further I could, really nice experience !

Graphics and music is fantastic! Perhaps it goes on for a bit too long as simply repairing modules is kind of repetitive.

Fin little game! Like the graphics, especially the nod to How's Moving Castle.

Could be improved with more modules to make it more replayable and fun for longer sessions.

Overall, a neat concept. Good work!

Designing and building ships was really fun, great work on the system! I was having some difficulties detecting the damage on the ship parts and the rising damage meter felt like it didn't show up consistently. I really liked the art style. Great job, keep it up!

Amazing work! Would love to see this idea expanded :)

I believe I have the world record :smirk: and I think this is the best form factor!

Overall a really neat experience. I like the visual queues you get just before the hammer appears. Art is amazing!

An astonishingly deep game for a jam project. The mechanics have real complexity, the theme is strongly present, and it looks and sounds good to boot! It takes a bit to get acquainted with all the different parts, but it's very replayable and quite rewarding. The only thing I feel it's missing is a clearer, more polished UI -- outside that, this is one of my favorite submissions so far.

Beautiful art and music, clever gameplay, overall excellent game. Enjoyed playing with different potential combinations of ship components

Graphics and music are awesome! I like the idea of building your ship with different modules, you can come up with different strategies every time you play.

Wow! This is definitely the most polished and complete game I've played this Ludum Dare.

The music and art are both great. No matter where I tried to build different components I never ended up with something truly ridiculous -- the fact that you have such a modular build system and things always seem to fit together is really impressive.

And the title!? Chef's kiss. I wish there was a "Title" category so I could give you more points.

Audio is nice, but was very loud for me. I seem to be having that issue a lot lately, so it could just be me.

Love the painted parallax background.

The boat graphics are very nice as well. Seeing a good amount of hand drawn style games this jam, and I like it!

Gameplay was fun. Had me wanting to try again to see if I could build a better boat.

Great graphics, lovely music, fun gameplay. Really well done overall!

Absolutely loved the game, enjoyed the audio and overall look and feel of the game. The gameplay is interesting and fun! Still trying out different combinations to build a better ship :)

Really fun game, but it's hindered by its terrible performance on my computer :(

As soon as the ship starts sailing, framerate drops to 2 FPS...

Great game, really creative idea building on a sinking boat.
I had like a floating sky scraper with 42(?) modules.
I really enjoyed playing it.
Maybe add a feature to scroll, at some point I built too much and the new building places where outside the screen.
Also at the beginning I just randomly build and after 5 builds there were no more places I could build.
Maybe add a feature that you have always at least 1 building space so you doesn't get stuck or be able to remove something

My first playthrough:

"I think I just created a perpetumobile! Heck yeahhh!!!"


(\*Spongebob Narrator\*: Ten seconds later) Okay, maybe not :(

What a charming game! I love it! This looks like an interactable story book 🥺 (also together with the font and all) The graphics are so lovely and the soft music fit really well.

The controls are very self explanatory and feel smooth!

Sometimes the UI of the boat parts was exceeding the screen, but as we all know gamejams I suppose there simply wasn't time to fix this, so it's okay, no big deal :)

This was my most successful run yet btw :D (by just starting out and buiding and waiting for events to unfold, so no further forging, but I'll try that next :D)

Good job guys! A cute little game! I feel like this could be a perfect little puzzle game! (where you need to reach your destination) with the Story book style, you could add a little story too 🥺
That would be a brilliant app game I think!

Overall: Great game! Great graphics, chill music and I really like the building machanic!

I have a few downsides though, the best part is the building part, but it's only at the begining and the it becomes only a clicker game where you have to spam to be able to repair the bricks, either we should be able to modify our builds during the game, or we should'nt be able to repair and everything relies on the build at the begining. But here it's a bit an unpleasant hybrid gameplay, while the game has a lot of potential!

Achieved 30k but stopped clicking cause I was bored. But again, overall it was great, and I especially like the Howling Castle look ! (maybe it was an inspiration?)

well done


Small pic of my ship btw since I found it kinda cool

Very pretty and calming. The curiosity made me play again, an awesome job.

@baubau wow, yeah that's definitely the highest score I've seen. Very impressive! My personal best is just over 20k. I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

i absolutely love this game, the visuals, music, and concept are just wonderful! how fun, to make my own Howl's Sailing Boat.

i had a lot of fun building a monstrosity of a boat, though it didn't do nearly as well as some of the others posted here!

absolutely excellent work!


also, i think i found your debug menu by pressing D heheh.

Very smooth! Only thing I can think to recommend would be a way to undo, or a phase before the game where you build the boat.

OR, if you wanna go on with it from here, some sort of buy pieces/upgrade them as you go mechanic and a story to go with it.

Great stuff regardless!

Really cool game! On my first playthrough I was a bit confused, because I decked my ship out with sails and couldn't build anything else, lol. My second playthrough went a bit smoother, though. I got a boiler and fan along with some hulls and castle. Lasted about 10km. I also see there is potential to build upwards forever. I haven't tested it yet, but it seems possible, unless the ship just sinks at some point, lol. Nice concept. I like the music too!

This was super awesome! One of my favorites so far. Everything really goes well together. The graphics don't feel too 'bright' nor 'dark', just right in the middle. The audio fits them really well too, improving the already calming atmosphere. The game also fits the theme of the jam really well. Not only that, this was a very different endless runner. This truly was a unique, different, and very fun experience. Very well done.

Very creative idea, beautiful graphics and great music/sfx. Congrats! It's very impressive for a 72h jam! I really enjoyed it.

Excellent entry. Not much to add to that statement, as I didn't see any real weak point in the game, you just did a wonderfull work overall. Really fun to play and excellent art direction, gg!

Pretty novel idea, well executed.

Love the art style, especially small touches like the painterly parallax background and UI elements, the modular ship parts looked cool and the variations on how you could design the ship was an interesting mechanic . Awesome job!

Nice entry! great art and sounds, i don't undestand the repairs part but overall nice job!

The art style looks amazing! The game is fun, but maybe the difficulty needs to ramp up more aggressively or some other challenges need to arise to make it more interesting on the longer runs. After 20 minutes I just kinda died on purpose, cause at that point it was just about me making a mistake and I think I could've gone on for a long time. Thank you for a nice entry! 

@sulo wowow, that's a crazy distance! What sort of ship configuration did you have? Most of my own runs I've tended to sink within 15,000 meters or so, so to get that far yeah I think you probably had a configuration that was a bit overpowered :). Thanks for playing!

I really liked this. The art and music is perfect. I love the idea that you need to frenetically add parts to try to stay afloat. Unfortunately, a very basic design will essentially go on forever as far as I can tell. Maybe you can lock the ability to do maintenance when there aren't any spaces left to build? Or make speed help keep your boat afloat so that a basic slow design doesn't go on forever. Or fluctuate the levels of wind?

I got a score of 10621! Your game is really enjoyable to play and has alot of potential for this sandbox-ish feeling. I also like the background and the feeling of acceleration, when you get a new propeller and stuff.

The artstyle is amazing and the sound design and music fits it so well. It was really interesting to build a ship and try to maximise its effectiveness. I almost reached 10000, but here is where the game falls a bit short, my ship could have continued, it sank because I stopped pressing the repair buttons. You build your entire ship at the start and then all you have to do is click repair after that. It would at least for me add to the game if you could only build a handfull of slots at the start and then had to build the ship as you go. So that you get something more to do than clicking repair. On the whole, great job!

nice artstyle and vibe, i made it until ~23000 ;)

that is such a cool idea, and from someone who loves game soundtracks, that is some beautiful music!

Nicely slicely done my friend. I enjoyed this. Subtle but important game feel pieces like the music. The first time I started sinking that caught me off guard in a good way and gave me the 'ah-hah' moment of what I am trying to do here. Well curated game.

Such a gorgeous game, really relaxing and love the different combinations you can. The hand drawn art was top notch too and went really with the mood and music of the game!

Simply wow! All: the art style, the music and the game mechanics are super well-made. Amazing job!

I'm not really sure how to stay above the water but I enjoyed this game - thank you! :slight_smile:


That's an awesome game! Really enjoyed every second. Art and sound are great! I liked the learning curve and the flow (hehe) of the whole experience. Extra points for humor for the german wortspiel in the title. :D
We also have a lot of those in our game. :D

What a lovely game! Love the music and the steam punk graphics :heart: If I could add one thing - more music :) After a few minutes it gets a little repetitive :angel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZafYagw5rRs

Solid entry! I love the art and music- just builds such a calming and perfect mood for a sailor-type game :D The only feedback I have is that the timescale could have been a bit faster, to create that overcooked-type sense of urgency I suspect you guys were going for.

Oh and also I managed to turn on the (surprisingly polished :sweat_smile:) debug log by pressing "D" lol. Might wanna fix that.

Overall though, good job! I had a lot of fun playing and got to a high score of 5356.

Beautiful graphics and ambience. It was a lovely experience playing your game. What you made was solid and I think with a bit more time to develop the gameplay there's some great elements to work with, congrats!

Saw your ask for more honest feedback, so I'll be very direct, hopefully this helps!

My overall takeaway was that the game had a pleasant, but not astounding presentation. However, it had an extremely shallow core game loop.

The first thing that struck me was that the game did not seem to have an immediately intuitive and clear goal for the player to achieve.

Think of the player journey: I start the game, I see a ship, three squares, and some stats in the top right. My instinct is to click on a square and build something random. A hull? Sure. Now what? I see a timer that's still counting up, and a build number that's gone up to 2. Okay, let's build something else now. A sail? Sure.

And now I see what the game is (maybe?) about. Going far, right?

So I play around with the parts some more, see my ship going, and eventually run out of spots I can build.

...Now what?

Up until now things have been shaping up to be a fairly interesting game. Looks like I have a good number of options for what to build, seems like they all will have some unique effects on the ship. Great, excited to see how I as a player can now use this information to strategically make meaningful decisions to perform better, and to quickly see the results of those decisions.

...Except now that I'm done building, the game has become a very boring game of whack-a-mole. No more interesting decisions to be made, just mindless clicking until the ship sinks.

In my very first play through though, I never even reached that point. Just sat around for a while, waiting for something new or interesting to happen. I got bored of clicking on panels, so I just let the ship sink after 10 minutes. Unfortunately for a jam game, this is already likely beyond the point that a player will stick around. Most people would close the game here, leave a rating, and be done. This is likely a large part of why your game did not score well. It grabbed my attention, briefly held my interest, then quickly pushed me into a tedious, uninteresting gameplay pattern.


That said, there's a lot of interesting systems here. I played a few more times to better get a sense of what the various parts were doing. There's definitely a lot of potential. I'm actually not sure what you were aiming for in terms of overall gameplay though. What were the core design pillars? What was your vision? What was the player fantasy?

If it was intended to be a game about trying many different configurations to get as far as possible, then focus the game on that component. Make the primary goal extremely obvious. Cut out or drastically reduce the whack-a-mole, let the player extremely quickly see the results of their builds, then scrap it and get out to do a new one. Let the player build something, see how it performs, then build something new, all within 60 seconds.

If it was intended to be about experimentation and creation of novel ships and seeing what new parts would do, then add many more parts to the game. Add progression elements, allow the player to reach milestones to unlock additional content and play around with new things.

If it was intended to be about the execution in repairing and maintaining a ship as it (inevitably) falls apart, focus on that. Either make it either more strategic or more action-based. Either way, make decisions matter. Make execution interesting and not tedious.

If it was intended to be multiple of these things at once, make sure you have your scope set out at the onset. If you can only realize one of these gameplay pillars in the time you have, focus on that thing and do it well. Otherwise, you end up with a variety of mediocre gameplay patterns, which will do far worse than one narrow, but brilliantly realized piece of gameplay.

Some extra thoughts, but this feedback is far less important than the above:

The art was pleasant, but a few things are a bit inconsistent from its painterly look that keeps it from being a stand out. The UI and build selection window definitely brings down the overall aesthetic as it kicks you out of this somewhat consistent storybook feel. With this type of an artstyle, you likely want a hand drawn UI as well to fit in. You can see some bits of art are more zoomed in and have thicker outlines, leading to an inconsistent look. The animations are a good start, but with this art style, I expected some more multiple frame animations, more than just translating sprites around. The particle effects and propeller animation greatly helped, and wanted more motion of the sails and the water against the ship.

The audio was nice, but the background loop was a bit dry and a bit short. The SFX was definitely a bit odd and felt out of place, particularly the sound effect for a hull starting to fall apart, almost sounded like a robot starting to say something.

Finally, on the tech side, I was astounded to see that y'all had implemented this game fully in vanilla JS. Super impressive to get this much done in vanilla JS for a jam, but we don't get points for technical excellence, do we? Think about using a game engine (could even be your own) if you want to get the most done in the shortest period possible.

@bogden Thank you! I really appreciate your feedback.

Hello, you asked for me to give your game similar feedback as you did mine, so here I am!

First of all, I think the game concept is really cool. The idea of making a boat that's continually sinking and you have to keep adding new structures on top of the boat to keep it above the water, creating this comical ship that's mostly below water. The art style fits the game perfectly, and the waves specifically look really good.

But I think the main reasons the game didn't do as well is the following:

1. There was a huge visual bug with the hulls breaking and filling with water. Most of the time it wouldn't even display anything except for the *very* subtle sprite change which isn't very noticeable. It's a good system when it works (usually works consistently after surviving for a while for some reason), but with the bug I didn't even know the hulls were breaking until I turned on the debug info.

2. The components need a lot of balancing. The castle component hurts more than it helps and hulls take so long to sink that you don't really need anything but a couple fans to go as far as you want if you keep fixing the hulls (so stacking components to stay above water level just makes the ship sink faster).

3. The audio could've had a bit more to it. The audio was definitely good, but I think more people would've rated it higher if the sound effects had been more prominent (something like boiler sounds and a loud metal sound when stuff breaks).

4. The graphics could've been more dynamic. I personally think the graphics were great, but I think a lot of people would've rated it even higher if there had been more distinct animations for when stuff breaks, or if there was just more complicated, impressive-looking stuff going on.

That's all I have, I think the game was really good, and the biggest issue was just the visual glitch I mentioned earlier.


Thanks @hawke-games! Really appreciate your feedback and think it's all fair. We had a last minute scramble after realizing we couldn't use some sounds we bought while still entering the audio category. So they ended up being pretty bad. I'm going to be more prepared next time :-)

Also. Wow that's an insane distance!