It's summer in Croatia!

One of the main benefits of living in Croatia is our coastline. It means that when it gets above 30 degrees we can all migrate down and spend several months working from the beach. 

This is obviously not true, the inflation since adopting the euro has been so bad and prices are so high that most Croatians can’t really afford to vacation in their own country anymore.

That used to be the case way back when, now we only dream about it…or we make games about what it must have been like to spend your life down there, trading olive oil, or grapes, or just (hard) wood.

Speaking of wood, that brings me to another game we made last year. It’s called Obala and it’s about trade routes, ships, and seagulls, noisy seagulls. 

What is Obala?

Obala is the Croatian word for coastline and the idea for it happened on, you guessed it, a coastline. Our game designer was on vacation (before the inflation hit) watching small boats travel from place to place and started thinking how it must have been to try and trade in an era with no GPS or spreadsheets or shared selfies. 

He came up with this idea of a simple game which revolved around using boats to ferry resources back and forth between small towns on a fragmented coastline archipelago. Anyway, we eventually wrote it into a pitch and sent it off for a small grant not really expecting much. We then got the grant and started working on it. It was one of the smoothest internal game jams we ever did, and the result was a relaxing and simple experience that you can play in the browser right now.

Play the game in the browser right now!

Yeah, but what is it really?

In a lot of strategy games, you have a pool of resources, and you spend that on building stuff. However, if you lived your life on a poorly isolated island, you’d probably realize that there is no wood or stone or olives or grapes. So, you hop on a boat and trade with someone, maybe you even get a good deal and can now drink yourself silly with all the wine you just bought. While we’re sure that historical accuracy is something you shouldn’t fact check us on, We are sure that this simple problem makes for a cool game mechanic.

So basically, in Obala, you have an island, you have a port…and you have ships. And with those ships you trade resources with another island that has other resources. This is all done in a very streamlined way so your grandmother can play and point out all the historical inaccuracies that the developers made.

Why make this?

We wanted to try and make a smaller idle game that anyone could play and experience as a backdrop, we usually tend to make roguelikes with more complex mechanics and systems that require a bit more time so this was a nice detour, to design something that’s very easy to pick up and play but also wanted a clear fail state so it isn’t just a screensaver. If you’ve played games like Mini Metro, Islanders or Dorfromantik you’ll feel right at home.

Long term, we hope to expand Obala with more content and features, maybe even a mobile version if people want it.

In any case, its summer, we’re taking a couple of weeks off and hope to be back in the fall with more announcements and activities. In the meantime, you can pretend to also be on vacation with us and give Obala a play, let us know what you think!