Set Sale is a strategic trading simulation where players grow a maritime trading empire by managing supply chains, optimizing trade routes, and overcoming the challenges of piracy and logistics. Inspired by Anno and Factorio, the game focuses on efficient resource distribution, trade optimization, and upgrading ships and ports to expand operations. Progression is tied to port and fleet upgrades to increase production and trade efficiency.
Being a top down 2D game, the art style for $et $ale leans towards a retro look while remaining clean and modern, relying on a mix of pastel and vibrant colours to distinguish between team features and world assets.
The ship sprites are made by rendering 3D models through a pixelate filter at 16 angles. This is repeated for each ship size, damage level but only one set for "team" ships and once for pirate ships. This is because shaders are used to replace the default team sprite and UI colours with the team colour, this allows for shading to be maintained while not requiring unique assets for each team at essentially zero performance cost.
Our menu is inspired by the Factorio where example worlds are displayed to add life to the menu background. This mimics the inevitable busy screen of moving ships that players should come to expect.
This is an early look at the combat system of $et $ale. State machines are used for ship behaviour. A command is sent from the player input to the selected ships, changing state. Then each ship perceives an enemy ship and uses the fight command to trigger the fighting state.
Want to get in touch? Drop an email at: