TORCHWATER

Light the water, draw the shoal, land the season.

TORCHWATER is a free incremental for your browser about a cove's fire-fishing fleet. On dark summer nights your boats row out and light the fires at their bows. Shoals rise to the flame and leap at it, and the netters scoop them out of the air. The same flame that draws a shoal is the only light you can see it by, and the moon decides how far that light carries.

How it plays

• The night. Tap a boat, then tap the sea to row there. Its torch draws any shoal it reaches, and the fish swim up toward the light. Everywhere your fire does not fall, you see at most nervous water: the surface shivering over a shoal.
• The flare. A burst of fire pulls fish from much farther off (4.3 cells against a burn of 2.7) and makes a risen shoal leap hardest, but it burns fuel four times as fast. Flare too early and the fish are still deep; wait too long under one steady light and the shoal grows used to it and sinks away.
• The light is a field. Two lights that pull one shoal about equally split it in two, so where each boat sits matters. A full boat has to row home to unload and refuel, and distance is time.
• The moon runs in eights. On a new moon any torch draws hard; on a full moon the water is already bright and only a flare pulls fish in. You can stay in on any night. Gusts blow out resin torches and rain shortens every reach.
• The morning market. Every fish more of one kind sells for less that morning, so a big sardine night is only worth it once the smokehouse can take the cheap end of the catch.
• The chandler opens as the moons pass: a second, third and fourth boat, a fuel shed, a lookout tower, carbide lamps (a steady white flame that squid will come to), glass hoods, wide nets for flying fish, bigger holds, lug sails, a second kiln, fire-tenders who flare and unload by themselves, and master netters you can hire again and again, each crew dearer.
• Forty nights to Lantern Night, when the harbour board counts your catch against the licence quota. Meet it for a bronze, silver or gold season; miss it and the licence lapses for a year. Either way you can fish another season with every boat kept.

Controls

Mouse or touch for everything: tap a boat, tap the sea, tap the selected boat again to flare, tap any button. On a keyboard: 1 to 4 select a boat, the arrow keys move its order, Space or F flares, G switches the torch between DIM and BURN, H sends the boat home, X changes the speed (1x, 2x, 4x), P or Escape pauses and M turns the sound off and on. By day Enter puts out, B buys fuel and the number keys buy from the chandler's list. Landscape screens get the wide layout and upright phones a tall one.

The game saves every dawn and every purchase. A night interrupted part way returns to that night's dusk. CONTINUE on the title picks it up.

Made for AI Browser Game Jam 5, theme TORCH.

More free browser games from CSAF

• BANNERET: SUCCESSION — Plant the banner and the whole House charges it. The dead stay dead — their heirs inherit the blood, flaws and all.
• CHARGE BARGE — Drive a storm ironclad up a hostile coast. Volts buy the hull; surge buys the miracle; the ram is a decision.
• OTTERBOUND — Six otters, one raft, and a river that never ends the same way twice.
• THE LAST FLOCK — Your army is a crowd you shape with movement alone — and it dies.
• RUSTBLOOM — You never find the key. You forge it. A top-down adventure where every lock has many answers.
• SECOND INTENT — A duel where the opponent is openly building a read on you — and shows you exactly what it has learned.
• FLOODMARK — The flood is not the disaster. The flood is the harvest. A cozy town builder you play by aiming a river.
• ANNEAL — Pour it big. Pour it right. You rarely get both. A free foundry game about size and temper.
• PERIGEE — An indirect god game where your only lever is the moon. Set the orbit; the tide does everything else.
• PRISMHORN — Seven bands leave your horn at once. Each one is a verb, and they fire together — you aim all seven or none.
• STARCHART — Every voyage you fly is inscribed forever — the route you took becomes the constellation.
• HALFLIGHT — Everything in the vault is decaying. That is what pays you.
• SEEDLIFT — A cozy farm that grows while you raid the wilds for seed. Beat the storm to the balloon lift.
• WHAT WE BURN — A horror game about the cost of staying warm. Burn what made you a person, or freeze holding on to it.
• UNDERSTORY — Spread a fungal network through a forest floor. Digest what you reach. It never wipes your board.
• SWALLET — You are the hole in the hill. Cut chambers, set wards, and decide who gets back out. Free, and it never resets.
• FROSTLEDGER — The ground gives more every winter. You pay for it out of the things you can still be moved by.
• BITTERWORKS — A soda works on a drying salt lake. The brine is finite, it moves, and the works has to follow it.
• CARILLON — A tower defence whose towers never shoot. Hang bells; where two rings touch, a spark is born.
• OUT OF SORTS — A typing roguelite in a letterpress shop. You do not have a word list, you have a type case.
• THE WARM ROOM — Keep a derelict glasshouse alive through one winter. The heat in the room is made of the people in it.
• MAKE YOUR NUMBER — Six ships in the dark and one lamp. Every case is generated, then proven to have exactly one answer.
• PROMPTBOX — Three minutes of an overture, played over and over. Only what you work out survives.
• TIDEPOST — Carry the mail between nine islands across a real current field. The ocean is the mechanic, not the backdrop.
• ECHO LOCATOR — A pitch-black stealth game where sound is sight: every noise you make draws the room and gives you away.
• BULLET HELL BOTANIST — You have no weapon. The garden shoots. Harvesting a plant pays you and takes its covering fire away.
• Vampire's Morning Routine — Dawn is coming. Shut every window, drape every mirror, get in the coffin. The sunlight is a real, bendable beam.
• CLEAVE — One row of five cards. You and the end of the world draft from it. Every card is a ward, or a horror.
• TAKEN AS READ — A narrator describes the room. His sentences are not true until you accept them.
• TEMPO DRIFT — A racer whose road is the beat. Steer on it and the song, and your car, speed up.
• CONTEMPT — A courtroom brawler. Objections are parries. Hitting opposing counsel works, and costs you.
• IRONROAD — A free beat-em-up down an elevated railway. Draft your combo, and where you set each move decides what it does.
• SPALL — A match-3 where the board is your mech. Getting hit shatters the plates where it lands.
• Gravity Plumber — Reroute the water. Ride the fall. A free browser puzzle platformer where the room tips toward its heaviest tank.
• ANAGAMA — A wood-fired kiln incremental whose score is a shelf of pots that will never exist again.
• ROOTBOUND — A plant that thrives shades the ones beside it. The bed you laid out perfectly stops working because it worked.
• SIDINGS — A winter railway where capacity is signalling, not mileage. One train per block section. Two is a wreck.
• POLDER — Take the land back from the sea. A free browser incremental where water is terrain, not a counter.
• THE DYEWORKS — A dye house incremental. Grow the dyes, tend the vats, and match the colour the town ordered.
• SWELTER — An icehouse incremental in a hot country. Your ice is evaporating, and the only thing insulating it is more ice.
• CLERESTORY — A cathedral incremental. Height is fame, and every vault you turn pushes its own walls outward.
• COMBWRIGHT — A free beekeeping game: lay out the comb, raise the brood, and keep the colony through the winter.
• AFFINEUR — A cheese-cave incremental where time is the ingredient: age every wheel to its peak, then decide when to sell.
• GASHOLDER — A gasworks incremental: the day makes the gas, the night burns it. Light a town and keep it lit through winter.
• STAGHORN — A reef restoration incremental: raise coral in a nursery, plant it cell by cell, and keep it alive through the heat.
• THEODOLITE — A survey incremental: raise trig stations, read the angles, and ink a county sheet by sheet before the fog comes in.
• COPPICE — A woodland incremental: cut hazel in rotation, sell what each age gives, and keep every age standing for the wildlife.
• CROSSBLOOM — An orchard incremental: plant each apple tree beside a partner that blooms when it does, and keep the frost off.
• HEFTSTONE — A hill farm incremental: hefted flocks, drystone walls, and a fell that answers your stocking.
• SHELLYARD — A fireworks yard incremental. Every shed's licence draws a circle no other shed may stand inside.
• SCOURFAIR — Keep an old chalk hill figure white, then cut your own. Every corner you draw is upkeep forever.
• Museum of the Future — Year 3000. Guide tours through a museum of our junk, invent its history, and keep your story straight.
• SCRATCH-OFF TYCOON — Rub scratch cards with a coin that wears down, read the colours, upgrade the coin and chase the Golden Ticket.
• SUGARHOUSE — A maple sugaring incremental: catch the freeze and thaw, tap the bush, draw tubing, boil jars for the fair.
• FLYWAY — Run a bird observatory on a migration headland. The wind decides who arrives.
• PYX — A free mint incremental. Thin the silver for profit, watch light coin drive out the good, and face the trial of the pyx.
• BANNWALD — Hold the snow above a mountain village. The forest you plant takes winters to grow.
• CHRONOLOGY OF A GHOST — A noir shadow-play mystery. Carry a lantern through a house where the past still plays, and read who did it on the wall.
• BRATTICE — The coal is easy. The air is the game. A free colliery incremental where every road you cut moves the air.
• KAIJU DISPOSAL — The heroes won. Now somebody has to move it. Cut up a dead kaiju before it rots, swells or glows.
• BUSY HOUR — A county telephone company, 1895 to 1935. Staff the boards and size the wires for the busiest hour of the day.
• GALE WARNING — Run a storm-warning office in 1861. Read the wired chart, hoist the cone before the fleets sail.
• SUMMIT POUND — Run a canal company where the money is water. Every boat costs the summit a lockful.
• TEA ESTATE — Run a hill tea estate: pluck it fine, fire it right, and sell it by the grade.

---

Paid, from the same studio

• PILOTAGE ($5.99): at dusk a fishing fleet comes home to an island anchorage, and every boat needs a mooring you can tow it into.
• FESTOON ($4.99): string festival lanterns through a generated tree with the fewest strings.
• LINGUIST OF THE DEEP ($9.99): on an alien ocean world, decode the glowing language of the creatures to command them.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. The code and the text were written with AI assistance. The boats, the harbour buildings, the four fish and the cover scene are pixel art generated with PixelLab from our own prompts; the sea, the night and its torchlight, every flame and flare, the shoals, the leaping fish, the lanterns and every screen are drawn by the game's own code. The music and every sound are synthesised by the game's own code (the two music loops were rendered from it), with no generative audio model and no samples. Typefaces: Bowlby One SC and Alegreya Sans, under the SIL Open Font License, which ships beside them.