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.’” 

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.

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.

“It is very scary,” he says. “If you are scared to release it, that’s probably the right feeling. If you are ready for it, you’re probably a bit too late already…When I tested it, I thought it would be okay, but players do all sorts of things and there’s this sandbox element to it. So you can break things in general in the early stage because I couldn’t expect the way people played the game. So there was a lot of learning from that. But I’m actually glad that it was released early because that gave me a lot of feedback to work with as compared to when I spent a long amount of time getting projects available to the public, it would be a lot of time spent building things that I didn’t know what if it was something that people wanted.”

Even with the struggles, YYZ says that releasing Havendock in such an early access environment has helped him develop it at a much faster and more efficient pace than his previous projects. At the time that we speak, he says he has around 2,400 Discord community members – sizeable. The help is appreciated especially as he’s largely working on the game solo, and still working part-time to pay the bills.

I went out for a day and the game had issues…so the whole day I couldn’t wait to just get back home and get to my computer.

“I think this approach is quite different from how normal developers do it,” he muses. “So I think this is also a big learning point and it’s super stepping out of the comfort zone for me…There was this one day, I remember I just went out for a day and apparently the game had issues because I posted an update the previous day, so the whole day I couldn’t get access to my computer, so I couldn’t wait to just get back home, get to my computer, quickly find out what the issue is and kind of push. It was quite stressful that day. So I think that’s some of the more things that I have to be more wary about.”

YYZ’s clearly deeply invested in this project, but when I ask him what it would take for him to consider Havendock a success, his answer is a humble one.

“Maybe if enough people know about it, I can ask my friend, ‘Hey, have you heard of my game?’ And they go, ‘Yes, I heard of it.’ Something like that. It becomes, I guess, common enough that it’s recognized. I’m not sure if that sounds like success, but I just think it’s cool.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.