One of the many games at the PAX Indie Pavilion, Cargo Chaos is a physics-based 2D puzzle game where players re-arrange different sized containers and crates on a cargo ship. Its up to the player to deliver as much cargo as possible, as the ship takes a journey to the next port.
In Cargo Chaos, you play as the captain of a cargo liner with a sudden exodus of dock workers. It’s up to you and your new found telekinetic powers to load the boats and make sure your cargo reaches its destination. Throw health and safety overboard as you organise your unsecured load and sail into battle against rough weather, high seas and creatures from the deep.
I had the chance to speak with Scott Beca from Considerable Content, a two-man dev team from Melbourne, who were showcasing two of their games. The concept of Cargo Chaos is quite simple, you load up the cargo ship with different types of cargo at one port, and then try to make the next port with as much cargo left as possible. As you progress, cargo with different shapes and attributes will be added, like animal crates that jump around during travel, explosive cargo and much more. Once you set sail to the next port, you’re still able to move the shipment around, and have to try and keep the cargo on the ship while it goes over waves of different heights.
The score is calculated depending on how much and how long the cargo is kept on the ship after the journey. As your score is constantly increasing, the multiplier determines by how much. Your multiplier increases over time depending on how many pieces of cargo are on the ship, and will reset back to one if any of the cargo drops into the water. The game gets real intense during the journey phase, and its pretty interesting to see which starting arrangements provide the least amount of maintaining during the journey.
Cargo Chaos is great fun and isn’t intimidating in terms of difficulty. The game is available on Android and iOS, and you can check out more details on Considerable Content on their website, as well as other projects they’ve been working on like Postman’s Odyssey, which was also shown at PAX.