Happy new year 🥳
Niwl Games
- 2 minutes read - 227 wordsWe wanted to say thank you for the support this year.
Wishing all of you a happy 2025!
One of the biggest changes this year has been the number of contributors on the game, going from 3 to 10 people.
Not full-time, obviously, but it has been great to learn from everyone on the team. From musicians to programmers contributing their expertise, moving away from solo-dev to just “frugal dev” has felt like the right choice for this project.
We’re trying to strike a balance between appealing to existing fans of management games -such as Anno 1800 and FrostPunk players- and bringing new players to the genre (Disco Elysium players, perhaps).
The time investment we’ve made on advisors and other NPCs this year will hopefully pay off in players building an emotional connection to their shipyard.
Khaleer has been helping us model a lot of the buildings, and we already have enough for a demo with a MVP gameplay loop.
Setting up our own web server for source control has taken some time, but this way we don’t have to pay monthly fees for a VPS, meaning all your donations are going directly to artists and programmers.
Here are some work in progress shots showing our style target:
Afternoon lighting.

Morning lighting. Testing Khaleer’s new crane model.

See you in 2025 for some updates on expeditions! 🌊⛵️