← All projectsProjects / Tidebreak2025 · solo

Tidebreak

A sailing roguelite where wind, hull damage and crew fatigue are one simulation. Snap a mast and the next twenty minutes reroute around it — emergent design, or a bug I've grown fond of.

WebGL canvas · no build
No WebGL build uploaded for this project yet
WASD steerShift trim sailE repairTab mapGamepad ✓Runs at 60 fps on integrated graphics. Nothing leaves your machine.

Trailer · 1:40

What I actually built

Buoyancy solver

96 sample points per hull, running in Jobs at 1.3 ms. Water displacement reads from the same heightfield the shader draws, so what you see is what pushes you.

Wind field

A coarse pressure grid advected each tick. Islands cast wind shadows, which is why hugging a coast feels safe and is not.

Run generator

Routes are laid out from a fatigue budget, not a difficulty curve — tired crews create the escalation on their own.

Water shader

Two-band Gerstner sum with foam driven by hull velocity. Cheap enough that WebGL keeps up.

Screens


Devlog

23 entries · newest first
Week 41

Buoyancy went to Jobs and came back 3.5× faster

4.8 ms → 1.3 ms on 96 hull points. Achieved mostly by deleting code I was proud of, which is the whole job.

Week 38

Tired crews trim badly, and that turned out to be the game

Fatigue now feeds sail logic. Runs got 20% longer and playtesters stopped quitting at the second island.

Week 35

I killed the weather minigame

Fun on its own, noise in context. Rest in peace, little storm dial — you were 1,400 lines.

All 23 entries →