Hullwright

Hullwright is a ship-design game where you never touch the controls in battle.

You run a shipyard taking contracts for a company pushing into contested space. Each job names an objective, an opponent and a budget. You lay the hull plate by plate, fit guns, reactors and drives, and send her out. Then you watch the recording.

If she comes back in pieces, the ship's log tells you why: a reactor that couldn't feed the guns, a turret with no line of fire, plate where the shells weren't landing. Fix the design and send her again, or start a new boat from her plan.

What's in it

• A grid shipyard: lay and armour plate, mirror fittings across the keel, turn guns and reactors, copy and paste whole sections
• Four stretches of space, each held by a different faction, with story missions and generated contracts
• A recording of every fight you can scrub through, with a ship's log of what happened and when
• Prestige to spend on facilities: new guns, missiles, bigger reactors and heavier plate
• A hangar that keeps every design you've sent, with its record

Controls

• Drag parts from the shelf onto the hull, or click a part and then click the hull
• Shift-drag lays a rectangle of plate, Ctrl-drag a line, right-drag cuts
• R turns the part you're holding or pointing at

Playtest build. This is an early prototype, so expect rough edges. It needs a desktop and a mouse, and is best played fullscreen. A first run takes about 20 to 30 minutes, and progress saves in your browser.

The game records anonymous play events, such as ships sent and lost, errors and frame rate, so I can see where people get stuck. There's no account and no personal data. I'd love to hear where you got stuck, and whether you could tell why a ship died.