Gabriel Conlon
Menu

Apps & games

Dead Reckoning

A top-down pirate RPG with real-time sailing and broadsides at sea and dice-driven boarding fights on deck.

Dead Reckoning at sea, with the player's sloop under full sail leaving a wake beside the harbor island of Mosquito Key, a rival merchant ship named Providence off to the starboard with its speed shown, a hull and crew panel top left, a wind compass top right, a minimap of the archipelago bottom right and a prompt to dock at Driftwood.
Status
In development
Dates
Oct 2026 to present

This was an experiment. I love Assassin's Creed Black Flag and wanted to see how hard it would be to make an app work on Steam Deck that had a similar ship combat system.

Does real sailing show up in it?

I did try in this app to place in things like how winds work, little triggers to remember things like what point of sail you are on, and even some of the tools we use for plotting passages, though they don't really provide much value right now.

Why Steam Deck and phone?

The Steam Deck was a challenge, and the phone build was for transportability.

You captain a sloop around the Windward Reach, a generated Caribbean of islands, ports and rival factions. Sailing runs against the wind in real time, and boarding turns into a turn-based battle map with d20 rolls. I'm working on progression now, with shot types, ship upgrades, a chart table for plotting courses and an intro voyage for new captains.

Built with TypeScript, Phaser 3 and Vite, and it runs in a browser, on iPhone and iPad, and as a Steam Deck build. Art is by Kenney (CC0).

  • Dead Reckoning's chart table, a parchment chart of the Windward Reach with named islands and ports, a two-leg course drawn in dashed orange, a compass rose, and a side panel listing the legs with Set course, Clear and Close buttons.
  • Dead Reckoning's boarding fight on a ship's deck, with five green crew tokens on the left facing three red defenders on the right, lit movement tiles, and Move, Attack, Defend and End Turn buttons.
  • Dead Reckoning's port of Driftwood, with a market stall, shipwright and tavern on a beach, and a menu of Tavern, Shipwright, Market, Governor, Chart Table, Captain's Log and Set Sail.
  • Dead Reckoning's plunder screen after winning the intro boarding, listing gold, cargo, experience, new hands and casualties, with two crew volunteers to accept or decline and a button to scuttle the wrecked hulk and sail on.

Updates

No updates yet.