LengthOfRope presents
Jonah Flint made it. Now he has to make it off.
Wash ashore, craft from flint to iron and build a ship to sail off your island.
In development for Android on Google Play and for Windows and Linux on Steam. Landscape only, fully offline, in English.
Shipwright Shore, a LengthOfRope game
A blocky survival game with a way out: the ship you build yourself. Wash up on an island with empty hands, work from flint knives to iron, earn the islands beyond your own, and keep a castaway with opinions alive long enough to sail away. Fully offline. No ads, no accounts.
Shipwright Shore is a blocky survival game with an end in sight. No dragon waits for you there. A ship does, and you build her yourself, part by part, on a slipway on your own beach.
The Marigold had five men aboard: a captain at the wheel, a man up the mast, a cook in the galley, a lookout who saw the storm first, and Jonah Flint, who mopped. Nobody trusted him with more. Then a wall of black came over the sea, the rocks came up to meet the hull, and by morning the Marigold was gone.
The sea let one man go. Jonah swam until he couldn't, and luckily he was good at floating. Now he has an island no chart has a name for, a beach where driftwood washes up every morning, and a plan: build a ship.
The opening is sure he is the last of the crew. A logbook on a far island is less sure, and on an island farther still, something heavy is pointing out to sea.
The island does not care that you are busy
You start with empty hands. Pull fibre from the grass, pick up sticks and loose stones, twist cordage, knap a flint knife. From there every craft leans on the one before it: a kiln before charcoal, bellows before bronze, a bronze saw before a single plank. Stone gives way to bronze and bronze to iron, and the Crafts screen shows what you can make now and what you are still missing.
The island does not care that you are busy. Hunger, thirst and cold nights all count. Rain soaks you, a pond cut off from its source goes stale, and after dark a fossa prowls the lowlands, though never into the light of your fire. Dig too close to a lake and the water pours into your pit; build too wide a span and it comes down.
Each boat takes you further. A raft of logs reaches the islands around yours. A rowing boat crosses to the iron beyond them, and there is more past that. The captain's chart grows as you go, and the wreck of the Marigold waits on the seabed for anyone with a diving suit and a lamp.
Jonah talks back about all of it. Stuff two chests into your trousers and you may hear:
A chest in each pocket. Very sensible. Very normal.
Die, and you get a little show of it, narrated with all the sympathy he deserves.
A ship to build and a sea to cross
Pick how hard your world is, from Easy, where a gold compass needle points to what you need and a death costs you nothing, to Hardcore, where you get a single life. Stop when you like: save from the pause menu, or sleep in a bed and the game saves for you.
Made for phones first, with two thumb sticks and a left-handed layout. On a computer it plays with keyboard and mouse, keys you set yourself, or a gamepad.
The game makes every texture, island and sound effect itself, and writes the music as you play. Fully offline. No ads, no accounts, no tracking, no in-app purchases.
Screenshots from the game, all taken in the game itself
Pre-release screenshots: the game is still in development, so what you see here may change before release.
Shipwright Shore has no folder of art
Shipwright Shore has no folder of art. Every block texture is a recipe of colour and noise worked out when the game starts, every island grows from a seed (the same seed always gives the same world), and the animals, the boats and the castaway himself are built from cubes in code. Sound effects are synthesised too.
The music is composed in code while you play and sounded on one General MIDI instrument bank, GeneralUser GS, which holds the only recorded sounds in the game; the app icon and the splash screen are the only supplied pictures.
Water flows by its own rules, every block knows what holds it up, and the castaway walks on custom physics rather than the engine's. It is written in C# on Godot 4. The game's rules live in plain libraries outside the engine and are tested without it, and chunks are meshed on worker threads, away from the frame, because a phone comes first.
The studio
LengthOfRope, the trade name of Bas de Kort's one-person business in the Netherlands.
Shipwright Shore, a LengthOfRope game, created by Bas de Kort, with Thomas de Kort as first mate.
Website and press contact: www.basdekort.nl
Ready to publish as it stands
A blocky survival game with a way out: the ship you build yourself. Wash up on an island with empty hands, work from flint knives to iron, earn the islands beyond your own, and keep a castaway with opinions alive long enough to sail away. Fully offline. No ads, no accounts.
Press contact through the contact page (in Dutch, but easy to follow).
