Ship Wars
A build-and-battle survival brawler where your bridge is your strategy—and your ship is your life. Role - Lead Game DesignerOverview
Ship Wars is an action multiplayer combat + building game for 8–13 year olds, inspired by Minecraft Bedwars. Players collect resources, build pathways and defenses, invade enemy ships, and destroy their core to become the last player/team standing. The loop is simple to learn, but the matches evolve fast based on how players build and fight.
Key Features
- Gridless building system: A custom, non-grid building mechanic that lets players create their own bridges and structures—more freedom than Minecraft-style block placement, and more room for creativity and skill expression.
- Tight economy that forces conflict: Rare resources are intentionally placed in contested common areas, pushing players to leave safety, build outward, and engage in combat to power up.
- Emergent match-to-match variety: Because building is gridless, players invent wildly different bridge shapes, defense layouts, and invasion tactics—so each game feels meaningfully different from the last.
Design Challenges
The core challenge was balancing creativity with clarity: giving kids expressive building freedom while keeping structures readable, gameplay fair, and combat focused. The economy also had to reliably generate encounters—rewarding smart routing and risk-taking without letting one early advantage snowball into an unwinnable match.
A sandbox… with sharp edges
Ship Wars is designed to create “I made that!” moments through building, then immediately test those choices through combat pressure. Players don’t just fight—they fight through their own construction decisions, turning bridge shape, wall placement, and defense planning into real strategy.
A platform-level experiment in items and inventory
This game was also part of a bigger initiative: building a holistic items + inventory system for the Terra platform. Ship Wars became a proving ground for how items are collected, stored, used, and surfaced to players—an ambitious exercise that helped validate and stress-test the broader platform ecosystem.
Outcome
Delivered a prototype that showcased strong potential for replayability and emergent strategy, powered by gridless building freedom and an economy tuned to drive conflict.
Documentation
Detailed documentation of the building system, economy placement logic, item/inventory integration, and core combat loop will be added here.