As my first venture into solo-dev, Windward will be a cozy sailing game about navigation and seafaring developed in UE5. Check the weather, set sail and explore a magical archipelago as you discover the world and find where you fit in the vastness of the sea.
Beyond the genre
Most cozy games rely on two design patterns:
- Content-based progression (like the seemingly endless decorations you can buy in Animal Crossing).
- Labor intensive yet often shallow and repetitive gameplay (farming, cleaning, etc).
One of the main goals with Windward is attempting achieve the Cozy-Genre experience and gameplay aesthetics, but with a Clockwork Game Design at the core of its underlying mechanics and systems, hopefully achieving a deeper gameplay experience with a more elegant design.
This should result in:
- Progression comes from mastering the clockwork instead of unlocking all the content.
- Labor remains interesting as it is built as a decision-making contest instead of repetitive gameplay.
Current Status
A 3C's prototype has already been built as a proof of concept for the major risks and technical challenges, while providing a set of core mechanics that allow stablishing Rational Game Design metrics for scoping, level design and tuning.
The prototype currently supports:
- Custom Endless Gerstner Ocean
- Capability of handing Wind directions that change wave and swell directions over time.
- Shader and gameplay logic stay in sync while simulating the waves independently thanks to the deterministic characteristic of Gerstner Waves.
- Dynamic Weather
- A modular system sets global weather targets and then each subsystem, like the Wind Subsystem, internally handles transitions and any relevant gameplay context.
- Day/Night Cycle.
- Simplified Sailing
- Core sailing mechanics that interact with the custom water and weather solutions.
- Simple controls for challenging the player's understanding of sailing without a high physical skill bar to keep the cozy aesthetic.
- Curved World
- To reduce world size and travel times without losing the vastness aesthetic of the sea and the need to interact with the navigation mechanisms, a curved world shader has been developed.
- Keeps the horizon near the player.
- Allows precise control over viewing distance, with the extra gameplay layer of making taller things visible for measurable, farther distances.
- [WIP] Celestial Navigation
- Currently in development, celestial navigation will be at the core of the macro gameplay of the Clockwork.
From there I am iterating on the supporting systems/mechanisms for the Clockwork core, and in so, polishing a Core Loop with enough depth to support the game while keeping the scope within target.
