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Bone Voyage

A tired reaper ferries souls across the River Styx on his last shift. You keep the boat level and slash away the hands trying to drag it down.

Code on GitHub
The Bone Voyage menu screen. A small skeleton reaper stands on a boat with two glowing souls, beside the title and a Begin crossing button.
The menu screen.
Status
Jam entry
When
Oct 2026
Role
Concept, design, sketches and script, with AI-assisted code, models and audio
Team
Two people, at a game jam
Made with
Unity, C#, WebGL

What it is

A burned-out reaper is on his last trip before he retires. You walk around the deck to keep the boat level against waves, wandering souls, and drowned hands that grab the edges. There are four legs of the river and each one is harder than the last. The story is told without any words. In the third leg, a skeleton puppy jumps aboard and changes his mind.

We made it for the Nimble Game Jam, which had no theme, and published it on 31 October 2026.

My part

I picked the concept and made the design decisions below. I drew the reaper and puppy sketches that the art is based on, wrote the on-screen lines, playtested, and made the final river and ghost sounds. Most of the Unity code was written by an AI coding tool. The 3D models came from Meshy and the audio from ElevenLabs.

Limits

  • We made it in about two days. We did not get to fully playtest the ending, or retrying after a capsize, before the deadline.

Decisions

These go from the first to the latest. For each one, what I saw and what I did about it.

  1. The organisers said they like ambitious games, and we only had about two days.

    I picked the ferryman idea over two others. One bold system and very little content

  2. Balancing the boat was already the whole game.

    We kept the controls to move, slash and restart. No jump

  3. The jam's own AI builder estimated about eleven hours, and that was all the time we had left.

    We made our own Unity version alongside it instead of waiting

  4. The first reaper concept looked too much like a character from a game I admire.

    I rejected it and based the reaper on my own pencil sketch. He is short and chubby

  5. If you failed, you had to restart a whole leg, and the last leg is over two minutes long.

    A retry now picks up about 20 seconds before you failed, and a tilting boat gets a moment to recover

  6. Our working title, Ferryman, was pretty generic.

    We renamed it Bone Voyage a few hours before the deadline