Blakeney
Blakeney started with a sailing game.
A while ago I built Blakeney Pit Sailing, a small iPhone game based on sailing around Blakeney Harbour on the North Norfolk coast. It was our first '3D' game and deliberately simple — we were just learning how to develop a game — but the idea behind it was something I kept coming back to.
What if we could make the harbour feel real?
Not a generic sailing game with Blakeney scenery added afterwards, but a little world that actually feels like this place. The mud, marshes, channels, boats, changing weather and slightly peculiar experience of trying to get somewhere when the tide has decided otherwise.
So that is what I am starting to build.
From an iPhone game to a proper world
The original Blakeney Pit Sailing will continue to exist as its own game. It's free, it's fun — you're welcome.
This new project is different.
For now I am simply calling it Blakeney, which is also why this site exists at blakeney.app.
The idea is to take what we learnt from the original game and rebuild the whole thing using Unreal Engine 5, to create and modify the boats, buildings, landscape and other objects.
That gives us a completely different canvas to work with.
Instead of thinking about a small mobile game made up of relatively simple scenes, we can start thinking about Blakeney Harbour as an actual explorable place.
You should be able to sail through it, walk around it and recognise it.
At least, that is the ambition.
Where we are now
This is still very early.
The development setup is finally in place. Unreal Engine is running on the Mac, which was slightly more eventful than it sounds.
There were a few false starts getting Epic Games Launcher installed and then persuading Unreal that Xcode really was there, but we got through those.
The next stage is the interesting bit.
We already have Blakeney Pit Sailing as a reference point. It contains many of the ideas, layouts and gameplay decisions that led us here, but rather than simply trying to make the existing game prettier, the plan is to use it as a starting point and rebuild the experience properly for Unreal.
That means creating the harbour again in 3D, working out the scale, recreating the boats and eventually getting one of them sailing around the Pit.
That first playable boat is probably the most important milestone.
If we can get a boat on the water, moving convincingly through something that already feels recognisably like Blakeney, then we have the beginnings of a game.
Why build it?
Mostly because I want to see if we can.
There is something quite appealing about taking a very specific place that I know extremely well and seeing how far modern game-development tools can take it.
Unreal Engine is capable of producing enormous cinematic worlds. We are going to use it to recreate a muddy harbour in North Norfolk where half the challenge is avoiding running aground.
Which feels like a perfectly sensible use of the technology.
There is no big studio behind Blakeney and no grand production plan.
It is being built on a Mac in North Norfolk, with a mixture of local knowledge and probably rather too much experimentation.
I’ll use this journal to document what works, what goes wrong and how Blakeney gradually starts to take shape.
At the moment, we have the tools.
Next we need some mud, some water and a boat.