Nanshe, the name cut into a mud brick

A river with seasons, and a delta you cut to catch it.

Cut channels, raise levees, and set gates that open themselves. The river rises and falls on its own long cycle, and the flood that remakes a delta comes only every few years: catch it and your fields grow, miss it and the ground turns to salt. The water is simulated rather than scripted. It goes where you dig, and it takes the bank with it.

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Coming to Steam Early Access · Windows and Linux

Trailer

The delta

A flood year covers the delta; a walled field of green crop stands dry inside its brick enclosure while everything around it is under water.
A flood year comes perhaps one in five. What it covers is yours; what it misses turns to salt.
A line of workers digs a channel away from the river, water already running in the finished stretch behind them.
Order a cut and the crew walks out to make it. The water follows on its own.
A brick-walled basin brim full of water among worked fields, a worker standing waist deep in the middle of it.
Salt only leaves dissolved in moving water. A field that floods and drains is clean.
A worked delta: canals threading between barley fields, reed barns, granaries and brick houses, with crew everywhere.
Barley, reeds, timber, mud brick, bitumen, and a crew who carry all of it.
A stepped mud-brick ziggurat standing in a palm-ringed precinct, canals and fields around it.
The ziggurat is the only thing here that is not useful, and the hardest thing to build.

What it is

The river rises, spreads across the delta, drops its silt, and falls again. Everything you build is an argument with where it goes.

Dig a channel and the water follows it. Raise a levee and it backs up behind. Cut a gate into that levee and you decide when the flood comes in and when it leaves. Nothing here is on rails. The water is simulated and goes where the ground sends it, including through the bank you did not think it could reach.

Silt is what makes the delta worth farming, and the flood is what delivers it. Plough the ground the water covers and you get a harvest. Plough the ground it misses and you get salt, because salt only ever leaves dissolved in moving water. A field that floods and drains is clean; a field that floods and holds is worse off than one that stayed dry.

Artist wanted

I am looking for a 2D artist for the game. Here is everything it needs drawn, with counts and sizes. Write to hello@nineacresgames.com.