Crown Harbor - city builder game

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  Town center - gameplay

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  Town center - overview

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  Coastal Settlement

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  Scouting Ship - teaser

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  Harbor Production

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  Settlement - overview

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  Observation Tower - teaser

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  Scout profession - teaser

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  Resource maps - teaser

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  Mining - teaser

Inspiration

“Crown Harbor” was inspired by classic isometric city-building games with beautiful artwork and a strong focus on settlement development.

The game emphasizes planning, resource management, production chains, exploration, and thoughtful expansion. Combat is not the main priority — the focus is on designing a thriving settlement and gradually turning it into a prosperous coastal town.

What it does

Crown Harbor is a browser-based coastal city builder. Players gather resources, construct and upgrade buildings, manage workers, organize transport routes, expand production chains, and uncover the surrounding map.

The game features forests, stone deposits, mountains, rivers, ports, warehouses, local storage, settlement goals, weather events, and scouting expeditions launched from the Settlement Center.

How we built it

We built the game as a lightweight browser experience using Astro, JavaScript, HTML Canvas, and CSS. The simulation is data-driven and divided into modules for terrain, buildings, economy, logistics, exploration, rendering, UI, and save management.

The game includes deterministic map generation, local saves, save migration, automated tests, generated building textures, and a custom isometric renderer.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was making procedural maps feel natural while guaranteeing useful resources near the starting settlement. We also had to balance resource exhaustion, transport routes, building footprints, and fog-of-war exploration.

Another challenge was keeping generated building artwork visually consistent with the existing isometric sprite style and readable at a very small in-game resolution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a complete playable settlement-building loop with multiple scenarios and a Creative mode. The game includes seventeen building types, warehouse upgrades, finite natural resources, roads, bridges, physical deliveries, production chains, local storage, weather events, and scouting expeditions.

We are especially proud of the Settlement Center, which gives exploration a clear strategic starting point and creates a foundation for future discovery systems.

What we learned

We learned that a strong city builder depends on the relationship between visual clarity and simulation depth. Small decisions — such as where to place a road, warehouse, forest lodge, or quarry — should have visible consequences throughout the settlement.

We also learned the importance of deterministic generation, backward-compatible saves, focused automated tests, and checking every new asset at its actual in-game scale.

What's next for Crown Harbor - city builder game

Our next priorities are expanding the exploration system with observation towers, scouting ships, purchasable resource maps, and scouts as a profession.

We also plan to add gold, coal, and iron deposits, more advanced production chains, additional settlement needs, improved animations, audio, and a larger campaign with new coastal regions to discover.

Built With

• accessibility
• ai-generated-assets
• astro
• automated-testing
• browser-game
• city-builder
• css
• exploration
• fog-of-war
• html
• isometric-rendering
• javascript
• local-save-system
• logistics-simulation
• pixel-art
• procedural-map-generation
• production-chains
• resource-management
• responsive-ui
• strategy-game