Studio / Projects / Turning Tides
In Active PlaytestWash ashore with nothing. Build your way off the island.
A first-person castaway survival game where every tool is earned. Scavenge a wrecked shoreline, craft what you need to stay alive, and build a raft seaworthy enough to escape north to the Big Island. Built from scratch in Three.js and playable right in the browser.
The Game
You come to on a strip of sand with the wreck still breaking apart in the surf behind you. No inventory handed over, no tutorial pop-ups, no map. Just a shoreline, a horizon, and the slow realization that the only way off is one you build yourself.
Turning Tides is a survival game wrapped around a single, honest goal: get off the island. Chapter One is the escape north — scavenge the beach and the treeline for materials, craft the tools that unlock the next layer of the island, keep yourself fed and rested through the day/night cycle, and assemble a raft strong enough to cross open water to the Big Island.
It is, technically, an escape game — the genre this studio was built on — just scaled up into three dimensions and a living world. The room is an island. The door is the sea.
What Makes It Tick
No starting gear. Every tool, from the first sharp edge to the raft itself, is scavenged and crafted from what the island and the tide provide.
A hand-illustrated recipe book of everything you can build, so you always know what a material is for and what to chase next.
Light, temperature, and the shoreline shift in real time. What washes up at dawn is not what washes up at dusk.
The escape isn't a cutscene. You assemble a seaworthy raft piece by piece and pilot it north yourself.
A full 3D world that opens in a browser tab. Nothing to install, nothing to update — just click and you're ashore.
Chapter One escapes the island. The story continues across the water — each chapter a new place, a new problem to build your way out of.
Behind the Build
Turning Tides runs as a hand-built Three.js world — no off-the-shelf engine, no launcher, no multi-gigabyte download. The entire game streams into a browser tab, which is the same principle the studio has held since 2006: great games should open with a click.
Building survival in the browser means fighting for every design decision. A few of the ones that shaped the game:
The opening beach is seeded so the first tools you need are always reachable — a survival game that strands you on step one isn't hard, it's broken. The early game is tuned so the raft is achievable in one sitting, not one week.
Flotsam and message bottles drift in from the north on the current, so the sea itself is a resource and a storyteller — the direction you escape toward is the direction your clues come from.
As a lifelong gamepad player, the studio designs these worlds controller-first — Turning Tides is meant to feel right with a controller in hand, not just a keyboard.
Screens
Where It's At
The studio's home for browser games. When Chapter One leaves playtest, you'll be able to wash ashore and play it free, right in your browser.
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