Shipping a management game with no art files

Salt & Stone is an isometric town-builder and trade game. You place quarries, farms and warehouses on a bare island, send ships out for what the island can't grow, and keep everyone fed through the seasons. It is the largest of our originals by scope and one of the smallest on disk, because the build contains no image files, no audio files, and no font files. Every tile, building, ship and panel is drawn in code.

This is a follow-on from the post on building without an engine — same idea, taken one step further.

What "no art files" actually means

An isometric building is a handful of parallelograms: a roof face, two wall faces, a base, each a flat colour with one darker and one lighter than a mid tone for the light direction. A ship is a hull curve, a mast line and a sail triangle. The UI is rounded rectangles and text. There is a palette — maybe thirty colours — and a set of functions that take a canvas context and some coordinates, and that is the entire art department.

The visual references were Manor Lords for the layout — back plots behind each building, a floating HUD, a town sign, a build tray along the bottom — and Anno 1800 for making production chains readable at a glance. Neither of those is achievable in code. Legible versions of both are.

What it costs

• No texture, ever. No weathered stone, no thatch, no water caustics. Everything reads as "a clean diagram of a town", not "a place". For a management game that is a defensible look; for an atmosphere game it would be fatal.
• No character art. The moment you want a face, a portrait, a person walking down a street, you are stuck. Code is good at geometry and bad at anything organic.
• The store art is a screenshot. There is no separate key art to make, because there is no art separate from the running game. The cover is a frame of the game itself.

What it buys

• The whole game is a few hundred kilobytes. It loads before a portal's loading spinner finishes its first rotation.
• There is nothing to license and nothing to attribute. No font EULA, no asset-pack terms, no "this uses CC-BY art so the credits screen is load-bearing".
• The art pipeline is a text editor. Changing every roof in the game from slate to terracotta is one line. Re-colouring for a winter palette is a function parameter.
• It cannot break in the way an asset pipeline breaks — no missing sprite, no wrong-resolution export, no atlas that didn't repack.

Where it stops

The rule from the earlier post holds here too: the code-only approach scales to games about geometry, systems and readability, and stops at games about place and character. Salt & Stone sits right on that line and leans systems-ward on purpose. A survival game or a narrative game would need real art, and trying to fake it in code would look worse than a smaller game with a few honest sprites.

You can play the current build free, in the browser, on its page. It is about 80% of the way to a proper demo.