Trading and questing game, with some upgrades and naval combat and potentially some lite base building.
Takes place in an infinite archipelago. While you can *technically* travel anywhere, there are currents that connect islands together and it isn't wise to bypass them early on.
Lore wise probably takes place in between Wild Pig Island and Fishing Game if I can swing it -- these are all ocean games so it would be neat to link them together.
The ocean -- you travel from Island to Island, following currents and seeing some kind of visual indicator of large islands polynesian-navigator-style. High seas piracy is a thing. This is possibly movable screens.
The Island map -- You can move around the outside of the island from Port to Port, potentially encountering Pirates or other things in between. This should have a single large screen or I guess for large islands you could have fixed screens.
Port -- Here you get to actually explore the Port on foot. This could be fixed or movable screens, it doesn't really matter either way since nothing entity-wise happens herein.
Fractal Tech
Islands are generated on the ocean map in some way, along with additional parameters.
The Island view will use the chunky fractal algorithm to sculpt them a few times (and add nearby noise) into something interesting. Ports are created where land intersects sea, in some kind of general region around that. Ports will be assigned additional parameters. Resource/terrain specialization concentrations are also procgenned at this step (or possibly the above one).
Actual Ports are regions on the island map -- they'll take the parameters assigned elsewhere and the terrain data and sculpt it out on a larger scale. This along with the Resource concentrations will determine the structures that are there and why. Additional steps will connect structures together with bridges or roads, and these transport networks will also influence what actually appears.
The end result of this are Port towns with a fairly unique layout and terrain layout so it'll be interesting to explore them to some extent. The actual gameplay then hooks into these regions.
There should be a single Map seed. Islands and Ports are assigned Pouches, as well as maybe Oceans along the Islands layer if they're easily nameable and there's something to them.
Basically identical to Merchant, except the content is handcrafted and resource distributions are based on the various parameters set at different procgen stages. Should be the kinds of things you'd expect of a colonial culture -- metals, tools, ship supplies, farming, livestock, munitions, alcohol, etc.
The values would probably change depending on relative resource scarcity and things should be kinda spaced out (but still randomized), so a bit different than Merchant since the system actually analyzes what's there.
Some additional mechanics:
Livestock need Feed to survive and this scales with the journey length.
Fresh food can definitely rot so fresh food routes aren't super profitable probably without ice or whatever. Food routes are probably more of an intra-island thing.
Basically identical to Courier or Merchant, not a lot of actual content here and Navigation isn't hell the way it is in those games, just an alternate source ofload out.
Worker mechanics
Having a kind of Work mechanism also makes a certain amount of sense, like you send one of your sailors with a skill in some discipline to do work in a place that needs the extra help, and you get some money that way. This could potentially be lucrative depending on your sailor loadout.
