Cozy Sail
A relaxing browser sailing game where your little boat grows from a dinghy into a trimaran, one buoy gate at a time.
Abandoned Side Project
Cozy Sail was meant to be exactly what it sounds like: a relaxing little sailing game. You trim the sail, steer with a tiller, and sail through pairs of red and green buoys. Every gate you pass adds 2 metres to the length of your boat, so it slowly grows from a tiny pram into a dinghy, a sloop, a schooner, a catamaran, and eventually a trimaran. As someone who spent a year sailing on a homemade trimaran, I already knew what the endgame would look like.
Out of irons, through the gate, and from sloop to schooner
Having done a fair bit of real sailing, I wanted it to feel right. The wind model accounts for apparent wind, the sail luffs if you trim it badly, the boat heels in a gust, and you carry your momentum through a tack. The day slowly cycles through sunset and into night, with lighthouse beams sweeping across the water, seagulls overhead, and a soundtrack of original yacht-rock tracks I generated with Suno.
Clear a gate, grow 2 metres
The water is where I spent the most time iterating. The ocean is built on Evan Wallace's classic WebGL Water demo, by way of a Three.js port by Yong Su (jeantimex). I then extended it with swell, a wake that remembers its foam, caustics on the sandbars, and a hull that actually pushes water out of the way. When it works, it's gorgeous. When it doesn't, you get a lot of screenshots for a folder I ended up naming "sail fails".
An early entry in the "sail fails" folder, where the wave simulation decided to swallow my boat
Over a couple of weeks I fought through water that turned into mountains, dark seams across the seafloor, potholes in the wake, and water that ran at double speed when you switched back to the browser tab. I played around with a bunch of ideas, and a lot of the work came down to removing things that didn't look or feel right: running lights, rigging lines, a bioluminescent wake, and even capsizing.
Night sailing past a lighthouse
Looking back, I spent a lot more time on the water than on the game. Sailing through gates to grow your boat is a nice little hook, but there was never much of a goal beyond that. I didn't want to take the obvious route of adding fishing or delivery quests, and adding multiplayer for a game that wasn't likely to take off felt like a bad use of my time. At one point my attention started shifting to the Sun Chaser game, and Cozy Sail just quietly drifted out of the harbour. It's a relaxing little game, but even the coziest cozy games need a motivator to keep playing. If you're interested, you can give it a whirl.