Hi!

I've just released v0.1 of Stormbridge.

In Stormbridge, you have 10 days to build a self-sufficient bridge settlement while outrunning an impending storm.

It's a strategy / city builder with some card drawing elements! I'm really proud of this project and the speed at which I managed to build it!

Do give it a try and let me know your feedback so I know how it can be improved and made more fun! You can let me know if anything was hard to understand or confusing so I can fix them.

This game is submitted as part of the Brackeys' Game Jam 2024.2. The theme of the jam is 'CALM BEFORE THE STORM', and in this devlog I'll talk about the ideation of how I came up with this idea!

When I saw the theme, my mind raced to work. 

There were two parts of this idea. 

First, the CALM. 

Secondly, the STORM. 

The storm cannot exist without the calm to contrast it, and the emphasis on calm to me meant the game had to vary between two modes – a relaxing one, followed by one of raging intensity. 

How do you achieve that? 

That led me to the idea of controlling a boat stranded at sea. You see a storm approaching you on the horizon, and you have to gather materials to fortify your boat to survive. 

You have a choice to also use the materials to build better rudders and engines to move faster, buying yourself time, but the storm will still catch up to you and then you are tested to see if your boat is strong enough. 

I fairly loved this idea. 

However, during my initial brainstorming, I would eventually swap to a new idea. I really loved the idea of building up to some kind of ending ‘test’, so I kept that aspect.

I first changed the idea to building a settlement on your boat as it gave me more to work with. But a settlement living on your tiny boat soon didn’t make sense as you’d be driving around a whole town. I didn’t want this to become a mobile version of ‘Havendock’. 

So I decided to remove the boat, and just make it a settlement. However I didn’t want it to be built like a traditional colony simulation game, as there is not a lot of time to teach the player and onboard them onto the genre in a jam. 

Thus, I opted to add restrictions to make the game easier to play. 

1) The game will be almost 2D traversal. Buildings have no “z-axis” to build on. 

2) The game will automatically decide the building placement for you. 

This takes away a lot of wasted time teaching people how to build, because the game does it for you. Visually it is also simpler to understand and code buildings in only one axis. Controls are simpler to teach too – no need to teach players camera controls. 

There came the idea of a BRIDGE. Building in only one direction. This aligned with an idea that I’ve always wanted to build: A settlement on a bridge. I think it is visually cool.

It was here that I gave the game its name, Stormbridge. 

And thus production of Stormbridge, began!