Portugues
Boat Journey
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Boat Journey starts with a suggestion from a stranger: you would be happier if you went to the ocean. To get there you need a boat, fuel and company, and the island you start on is not a comfortable place. People on the island will join your trip if you talk to them and you have a seat free: a surgeon, a physicist, a thief, a soldier, a surveyor and plain townsfolk, each with something to offer, and the innkeeper who looks after the inn. Each one is drawn as a big pixel portrait when you speak to them.
By day you walk the island on foot, opening doors, trading with people and picking up junk to spend at the inn. When it gets dark the island turns dangerous (the locals say that "they mostly come at night") and the safe thing is to be indoors. Beasts and ghosts roam outside, and a ghost's touch takes away your body. You can also drive the boat itself, and the sea has its own hazards: the fuel runs down, and if it runs out you are stranded.
Runs end in many ways, and the game writes you a short epitaph each time: reaching the ocean with passengers on board, staying in the inn, being left behind by your own boat, or settling down for good on a stalled hull. Each attempt is a different small story.
Playing it here
Click Play. The island is drawn with letters and shades on a grid that scales to fit the frame, with large pixel portraits for conversations. It needs a keyboard (the mouse helps with aiming and with reading descriptions), keeps your run in this browser only and makes no requests outside this site.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | walk on foot |
| Space | wait a turn |
| 1 to 9 | use an ability |
| E | get into or out of the boat |
| Arrow keys on the boat | forward and backward, turn left and right |
| Mouse or arrow keys | move the cursor when aiming, then Enter or click to confirm, Esc to cancel |
| H (on the title screen) | help |
Tips
Walk into doors. A door (+) opens when you walk into it; walk into the wall beside it to close it again.
Go to the inn when it gets dark. The night is when the dangerous things come out.
Mind the empty seats. Passengers can only come aboard if there is room, and a full boat changes who you can take.
FAQ
Is it scary? It has ghosts and beasts, but it is drawn in simple text and portraits and there is nothing graphic.
What happens when a run ends? The game writes a short epitaph about your trip, and you can start another one.
Does it save? The game keeps its save data in this browser only; we did not find a Continue option on the title screen after reloading, so treat each visit as a fresh run.
Credits and licence
Boat Journey was made by Stephen Sherratt (gridbugs) for the 7DRL Challenge 2023 and is released under the MIT licence. It is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly by us from the author's source at a fixed commit, with his libraries and the other open source crates listed in the licence file. The portraits are part of the author's repository and covered by its licence. The pixel font is PxPlus IBM CGA (and its thin variant) by VileR, from the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack at int10h.org, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The files are the ones in the game's repository; their names say they carry extra quadrant-block characters, which the game's author added to VileR's font under the same licence. We replaced the author's web page with our own (it blocks connections outside this site, keeps the saved game under its own key and scales the display to the frame). The licence texts, the source and the build script are linked from this page.