SHELLYARD

A fireworks yard, shell by shell.

SHELLYARD is a free fireworks yard incremental that plays in your browser. Every shed in the yard holds powder, and the licence it holds draws a circle that no other shed may stand inside. A bigger licence works faster and forbids more ground. You mix, roll the stars one colour at a time, dry them while the weather lets you, fill the shells and stack them in the magazine. Then you fire the town's commissions, and every show plays in the sky, built from the shells you picked.

Four things that pull against each other

• The yard. A mixing house, star rooms, drying racks, a filling shed and a magazine. Every shed that holds powder carries a licence tier from 1 to 3. Raise a tier and the shed works up to 3.5 times as fast, and its circle grows, so the yard needs more land, bought a strip at a time. An earth traverse takes a plot off a circle. If a shed goes up in an accident, the circles are why it is the only thing you lose.
• The line. Composition is rolled into stars of one colour each: red, then gold, green and blue (blue yields half). Wet stars dry on the racks by the weather (fast on a clear day, slowly on a damp one, not at all in rain), and a stove house dries them whatever the weather. The filling shed works through a plan of three slots, each an effect, a colour and a calibre from 3 to 8 inches.
• The year. Four seasons of ten days with a forecast. Summer is driest, and the wettest weeks carry the biggest commissions: Bonfire Night and New Year on the pier.
• The commissions. Each brief has a date, a palette, a calibre limit and a minimum. You fill its crate from the magazine and it fires on its date. The score weighs the palette, the count, the variety of colours and effects, and the rhythm, a finale bigger than the opening. Fees and renown follow the score, and renown opens nineteen upgrades: three more colours, four more effects, bigger calibres, more racks, a foreman.

The goal

At 1,200 renown the city asks for your display: THE CITY FESTIVAL, at least 60 shells from your own magazine in four colours and four effects, with a finale of eight 8 inch shells. Every good shell you fire for a fee is one you are not keeping for it. When it fires, the whole night is drawn on one long exposure over the city, with its programme beneath it.

Nothing restarts. The yard saves as you go and keeps working while you are away, for up to a season, settled as arithmetic so nothing lags when you come back. A shed lost is rebuilt; composition can always be sold back.

Controls: tap or click a shed for its card, a tab for its panel, a brief for its crate. It also plays from the keyboard alone: the arrow keys and Enter over the yard, the number keys for the buttons of the open panel (each shows its number, and 0 turns to the next nine on a busy panel), T for the next tab, plus F 3x speed, P pause, H help, M sound and Esc back. It plays on desktop and on a phone held upright or sideways, each with its own layout.

Paid, from the same studio

• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills in a farming parish so every farm's cart has the shortest road.
• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.
• THE TURNING YEAR ($9.99): one world drawn four times over; turn the season and hold it while the year pulls back.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every picture in the game, every firework included, is drawn by code written for it, over ground plates from our own procedural pixel engine. The music ("Lighting Up Time") and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model. The town and its commissions are invented.

More free browser games: HEFTSTONE, GASHOLDER, THEODOLITE. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.