Ship of Thesis

This was a solo development project, and all code, behaviors, and assets other than those credited in the game were created by myself. I went into this project having recently played Windbound, a survival roguelike with a heavy emphasis on sailing, and I lamented the fact that so few games had more in-depth mechanics for controlling a sailboat, like that game did. The two control schemes I ended up testing emulated the more complex scheme that Windbound had (which gave you control over the height and angle of the sail in addition to steering via rudder), and a more simplified ‘arcade sailing’ scheme modeled after The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (Only a toggle for whether or not the sail is up, and steering via intended heading).
At first I stressed over the simulation, wanting to make it as realistic as possible and almost convincing myself to do a paper on fluid dynamics instead, but I quickly re-scoped and settled on A/B testing control schemes on a common underlying physics model instead. I took a break on development during the Mass DiGI XP3 program (Kitten Coliseum), and the vast majority of the coding happened in the final semester after that project had been completed.