Port Father

The question

Browser games in this genre have been around for twenty years, and most of them look it: a list of links in a frame, tables full of numbers, and a layout that falls apart on a phone. While that is exactly the screen people play on, in two-minute bursts.

I wanted to make one that genuinely belongs on a phone and is still deep enough to hold you for months. That means solving two things at once. On one side an economy that adds up: if money comes in too fast the game is over in a week, too slow and everyone drifts off. On the other a world that is actually about something, not about "city 1" and "mission 3".

So it became Antwerp in 1931. The docks, the Scheldt, the Schipperskwartier, the Meir, the Zuid: places that exist, in a time when smuggling across the water was the most normal thing in the world.

What I did

Built entirely by me in PHP and MySQL, no framework. The source sits above the web root and only the public folder is reachable, so there is nothing to find for anyone poking around.

The city is a drawn map of Antwerp where you tap on buildings. Six districts, each with an occupancy that shifts as people play. Around that hangs the rest: eighteen crimes each with their own odds, work on the quay in shifts, a boxing club, a garage with cars and street races, a casino with six games, smuggling across the water, heists, contract killing, police and prison, a hospital, bodyguards and investigation. Nearly fifty bespoke screens in all.

Families are the social side: you found one or you join, with roles up to godfather. Above that sit the ranks, from soldier to Harbour Father at level one hundred. There is a forum, a messaging system, achievements and a leaderboard.

The balance lives in the numbers, not in gut feeling. Nerve regenerates in real time, every crime costs a fixed amount of it, and the experience curve is a formula I can check separately before changing anything. All prices and payouts sit in one place, so an adjustment works through everywhere at once instead of in seven separate spots.

The screen was drawn for the phone first: a fixed bar at the top with your health, nerve, money and diamonds, and a navigation bar at the bottom within thumb reach. On a large screen the menu simply sits beside the game. It installs as an app too, with notifications when it is your turn again.

Beyond that the game runs in three languages, paying for extras goes through Stripe, and the recurring things like regenerating nerve and expiring sentences come from a task that runs every five minutes. New players are walked through their first steps by a guide instead of landing on an empty screen.

What it delivered

A finished game that is live on its own domain, with a hundred-odd database migrations behind it and a world big enough to get lost in.

It plays best where it was made to: on a phone, in between things. And it looks like Antwerp in 1931, not like a spreadsheet.