A delightful pirate game! The art, while simple, do a great job setting the scene, and conveying the information it’s meant to convey, and the enemies are challenging without being frustrating!
The controls, however, are a little awkward. Tying the speed up and slow down mechanics to the direction your moving, for instance, is a good idea, but that only seems to work if I’m going directly vertical or horizontal and not on the diagonals… or, at least, the mechanic doesn’t work well on the diagonals (I think I sped up once on the diagonal, but it didn’t feel the same as going up/down/left/right)
I think my biggest issue was with the aiming. While I could understand why I couldn’t shoot forward and backwards (most boats couldn’t, I would think), shooting in the other directions was… tricky. For instance, if I’m heading up and aiming to the left, if I have to turn my boat, for instance, to the left (moving up-left diagonally) , I’m no longer aiming to the left relative to the boat, but I’m still aiming left relative to the screen (hope that all makes sense). This aiming scheme, for me, gets very confusing, especially in the middle of a fire fight with another boat.
One other suggestion I have is, for the forts, maybe give them a little bit of an “aim ahead” AI. I found I could cheese those forts by just going full speed in a circle around the island and they could never hit me because their cannon ball took too long to get to where I was. With an aim ahead, I think, the forts get a little more challenging as the player would then have to vary their speed or direction because the cannon balls would be a little more accurate… OR… (I just thought of this while writing) make the forts spawn enemy ships! Player is cheesing the fort, swimming in circles around it, all of a sudden, there’s an enemy ship! Now the player has TWO sources of cannon balls coming at them!
Anyway… A very enjoyable game, even with the control issues I had. Very well done!!