Some time ago (that’s 2007), we released High Seas: The Family Fortune.

The thing with software though is that it stops working. But with, well, modern tools it turned out to be surprisingly quick to make my old compiled (Java!) game run in modern browsers.

Please play it here: https://jesperjuul.net/play/highseas/

The High Seas core team was my old collaborator Mads Rydahl and me, and we thought – quite prematurely – that match-3 in the style of Bejeweled was over, and hoped we could invent a new mechanic. We prototyped heavily using GameMaker and ended up with a new concept that merged the two main traditions of matching games, the “manipulate fallen tiles” of match-3 and the “manipulate falling tiles” of Tetris – in High Seas you can move everything, all the time. In addition, and I think this was inspired by the card game Set, you can make matches based on both similar colors and similar shapes.

Through persuasion and connections, we secured a deal with Game Trust, a casual game developer/tool company (fun fact: Elon Musk was on the company board).

This was a spare-time project for all of us, but also incredible amounts of work. As co-game designer and programmer, I had dozens of special-case situations to consider, as when the user tries dragging a falling tile to the right side of the screen, wrapping around to the left, just when a match is occurring, and new falling tiles are waiting for the player to release the tiles below, and a blocking tile anyway stands in the way in the middle of the line. And so on. It was a lot of programming of the sort where you have to balance any number of interlocking elements and think hard about the right steps for solving the conundrum in all possible situations. Was it also somewhat overengineered? For large projects I always end up making entire game engines, as I did here. On the other hand, that probably made it easier to convert to the present-day platforms.

2006-2007 was just at the peak of the downloadable casual games boom. Downloadable casual was a new thing, both for reaching a broader audience than the larger-budget games of the day and for the then-fancy new distribution method of downloading a game to your computer. In the initial release of High Seas, we had unfortunately taken “casual” too literally and made the game much too easy. If you see an echo of this experience in my two books A Casual Revolution and The Art of Failure, you are not wrong.

In the second version, we had found better difficulty balance (do try the Expert mode), and also added many more effects. I still enjoy playing High Seas, and now you can play it on a modern computer or on a phone.

Credits

Developed by: Soup Games & The Planet
Game design: Mads Rydahl and Jesper Juul
Graphical and model design: Simon Sonnichsen
Graphics & 3D: HappyFlyFish / Michael la-Cour and Jesper Fleng
Additional graphical design: Mads Rydahl
Sound: Kæv Gliemann
Story writer: Heather Chaplin
Programming: Jesper Juul
Special thanks to: Rasmus Keldorff