This week’s game project is Harridan Bay, a concept I’ve had kicking around for a long time, and one I’m planning to release on cassette tape for the TI 99/4A computer this year.
I came up with the idea for a game called High Seas ages ago, influenced by 1980s titles like Seven Cities of Gold and old-school BBS games like Trade Wars 2002. The basic concept has remained the same – you’re based in a shipbuilding town on a fictional bay, you buy ships and send them off to trade in the various ports of call within reach, and you try to make your fortune.
[Now that I think about it, there was this early Commodore Amiga game actually called Ports of Call in the mid-to-late 1980s, and it was basically the same idea, but with real-world locations and big container ships.]
The name change coincided with a shift in how I’m designing, and a focus on worldbuilding that I didn’t have before. I have a big “master plan” type project for down the road a bit, small pieces of which I’ve shared in fiction form before, but it’s basically a whole bunch of stuff that happens in a different solar system. I want to write books about that world, and also create games that stand alone but take place in that universe.
Harridan Bay is part of a practice run for that lofty project. As I create the bay and the cities your ships visit, I’m dreaming up histories for them, and for the lands beyond. I’ve even integrated another game, Tollkeeper, into the mythos – in that game, caravans traverse the badlands to the west of Gyllix, one of the cities on Harridan Bay, and the player is one of two warlords collecting tolls and conquering land in that space.
My ‘aha’ moment came when I was kicking around yet another idea, determined to make it the next thing off my workbench. Like many Gen-X’ers, I have fond memories of the Lemonade Stand game I used to play on the Apple II computers in elementary school. The game’s been around since the mid-1970s, and has been updated for younger generations, so you’ve probably seen some version of it.
My concept is “Lemonade Mafia” – a game that adds competitors, dirty tricks, arsenals of kid-appropriate weapons (rotten eggs, for one) and RPG-style combat to the formula. I love the idea in general, but I spent some time coding and scribbling on graph paper last week with only the vaguest idea of how I actually wanted it to look and play.
After going down a rabbit hole designing a whole town map and navigation system, I realized I was on the wrong track (although that map will resurface in yet another fucking game idea I have now). I also realized that the trading and profit-and-loss formulas I wanted to write were already partly in place in High Seas/Harridan Bay. And the more I reworked the Lemonade Mafia screen design, the more I realized I needed to use those ideas, and that momentum, to finish my existing game.
So this week’s goal is to get up every morning, take my walk, eat my oatmeal, grab a shower, and then use those peak morning hours of gumption and alacrity to get a few hours of coding a day knocked out. I’ll be able to reuse and refine stuff I wrote years ago, including some sound effects I really like, and I want to devote some time to making the map look a lot better if I have the memory. This is another game that needs to fit into 16K of TI’s slow built-in BASIC, so some corner-cutting will be necessary, but I have ideas.
Releasing these games is a big part of my 2024 goals, but more importantly, so is the change of routine and habit that’ll allow me time to work on them daily and make real progress over time. I can’t wait to get this slate of projects turned into reality and then use what I’ve learned to tackle a whole stinkin’ galaxy.