Havendock’s Calm Oceanic City Building Belies Its Ambitious Community Development

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been stumbling around looking for a lot of in between games this year. Tears of the Kingdom pretty obviously has dominated a huge chunk of my life for the last month. And recently I was in LA for Summer Games Fest. Earlier this year, I was playing Kirby, and when I get home, I have Humanity waiting for me. But all of these games have been a bit too high stakes to just chug away at the whole year. Lately I’ve needed something slower, something I could get lost in. And recently, I’ve found myself dipping in again and again to a little game called Havendock.

Havendock is a city builder – one of those cozy ones that presents goals but low stakes, so you don’t have to frantically sort out a civilization as its populace crumbles in your arms. It takes place not on dry land, but in the middle of the ocean, starting on a tiny deserted island and proceeding to build out on a series of interconnected wooden docks. You build more docks to make more space for more housing, more people, and more mechanisms that will make your life somewhat easier. Potable water is the first concern, followed closely by something to eat, and shelter. Eventually you’ve worked your way up to dance floors and chicken coops. Materials drift lazily by on the waves, lending an element of pleasant randomness and surprise to your work. More recently, I’ve made a dance floor and a prayer center so my residents have something to hope for – which isn’t me being glib, it’s a literal game mechanic.

While your castaways do get hungry and tired, their needs build so slowly and are so easily fulfilled, their existence is rarely if ever stressful, at least in the several early hours I’ve played. It makes Havendock largely a soothing way to putter around with civilization building, interspersed with moments of humor such as discovering that I can grow hamburgers in the garden, or when I see the very human touch of silly names the NPCs that arrive to assist me have. Havendock is full of this personable goofiness, speaking readily to being a game eager to please a growing community throughout an early access.

Creator Yeo Ying Zhi (who goes by YYZ) got his start working on flash games as a teenager, and eventually took some classes to help him get started learning 3D engines such as Unity. He worked on some personal tower defense game projects for a bit, and also released a 2D idol RPG game called Enchanted Heroes that’s seen some success. Havendock is YYZ’s first attempt at a larger 3D game, and while he’s been fascinated by 3D animation and game design for a while, it took a random, restless night to give him the push he needed.

“I was lying in bed and I couldn’t fall asleep,” he says. “It was like 3 am. So I just had this idea of being in this peaceful place where you’re in the middle of the ocean. And then I made some concept out of it. I wasn’t serious about it turning it into a game. It was just some concept that I had in my head. And then it floated around, and then after some time I decided, ‘Okay, I guess I’m going to try to make this into a game.’”

YYZ has his work cut out for him, not just in the transition from 2D to 3D animation, but also in his goals to make a proper multiplayer experience. I haven’t tried the feature out yet myself, and he bills it in the early access version of Havendock as “highly experimental.” It’s easy to see why, from his description.

“Whenever the character deposits an item into the building, you need to link that across all the players, all the buildings, the items in them, and the characters themselves on top of that. So it’s that interaction that actually makes it very, very difficult to have the game be really smooth in multiplayer. Currently, that’s why there are a lot of issues with multiplayer that I’m trying to fix.”

While some might balk at playing something that clearly isn’t finished, having an open development like this is something that’s important to YYZ. He’s been blogging prolifically about the development process, taking community feedback into account and being as transparent as possible about the problems involved in even simple aspects like letting NPCs drink either fruit juice or alcohol at the bar. He’s been this open from the beginning, too, telling me that he released the earliest version of Havendock to the public about six to eight weeks after he started the project.

Havendock Screenshots