About Fortune's Wake
Fortune's Wake started from a simple idea: what if outfitting a ship was itself the strategy?
Instead of equipment being a list of stat upgrades, weapons, sails, and utility modules physically occupy space on the ship's deck. Players have to decide not only what equipment they want, but what can actually fit together and whether that loadout is suited to the expedition ahead.
The prototype grew around that idea into a pirate-themed strategy loop of outfit → choose a route → survive encounters → return with rewards → improve your fleet.
Inspiration
I wanted to combine the satisfying inventory-space decisions of grid-based equipment games with the feeling of preparing a ship for a dangerous voyage.
A major goal was making preparation matter. Players can see what kinds of threats lie ahead, then make meaningful tradeoffs between combat power, mobility, survival, and utility before setting sail.
How I built it
Fortune's Wake was developed through an AI-assisted, prompt-driven workflow.
I worked iteratively: implementing one playable system at a time, testing it, identifying what wasn't working, and then refining the design rather than trying to build the entire game in one pass.
The prototype is built as a self-contained portrait HTML5 game using JavaScript and CSS, with all assets and dependencies packaged locally so the game can run completely offline.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was making several systems feel like parts of one coherent loop rather than separate menus.
Ship outfitting needed to influence encounters clearly. Expeditions needed to give players enough information to make preparation meaningful without revealing everything. Progression needed to introduce new options without simply making earlier ships and equipment obsolete.
Another challenge was pacing. Watching the ship's equipment resolve encounters was fun, but early versions could become slow or repetitive. Multiple playtest passes focused on making those interactions faster and easier to read while keeping the consequences of the player's loadout visible.
What I learned
The strongest improvements usually came from simplifying rather than adding more.
Making equipment roles clearer, exposing useful information before an expedition, reducing unnecessary interaction steps, and giving ships different strengths produced more interesting decisions than simply adding additional systems.
Fortune's Wake ultimately became a prototype about building the right ship for the voyage ahead, rather than building one universally optimal ship.
Built With
- ai
- chatgpt
- codex
- css
- git
- html5
- javascript
- openai
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