Anchor Point
press kit

One-liner

A server-authoritative commercial fishing MMO set in Alaska — the working sea, built by one person.

Short description

Anchor Point is a commercial fishing MMO on the Alaskan coast. Run your boat, work real deck stations, read weather that can kill you, and sell into a living port economy shared with every other captain on your server. Grow from a gillnet skiff to a crabbing vessel — and into the sea's older mysteries.

Long description

Anchor Point takes the working sea seriously. You start at the dock with fuel, ice, bait and permits — every litre comes off your margin before the lines are off the cleats — and from there the game is a job done properly: real deck stations, real gear, a hold that has to be sorted and iced, and a run home that has to be earned. Weather is not decoration. One server-owned forecast runs the sky for every captain at once; it moves dock prices, hull speed, catch behaviour and the genuine risk of losing your gear and part of your cargo. Reading the sky is the core skill of the game.

Every captain on a server sells into one living port economy. Prices move with supply, season and weather, and they are rolled on the server, never on your machine — a storm you never sailed into can still move the price of the fish already in your hold. The coast keeps a calendar: runs open and close with the seasons, ports celebrate, and the market remembers. Under the hull is an in-house simulated ocean cut from real survey bathymetry, ten grounds deep, from a sheltered estuary to the wall at the ice edge. Twenty-six species keep real depth ranges and schedules; and out past the charted grounds are the sea's older stories — legendary fish that are found, not farmed.

Bring a crewmate aboard with Deck Crew co-op: they take a real station on your deck, not a copy of your boat. Grow from a gillnet skiff to a crabbing vessel. And know that all of it — design, code, ocean, economy — is built by one person, documented in the open.

Anchor Point is built by one person: Ekin Arca, a developer in Istanbul who shipped a smaller game first and then spent three years building the fishing MMO he wanted to play.

The whole thing — design, C++ systems, the FFT ocean, the server economy — is one pair of hands, documented in the open. The Journal covers scope, systems and the realities of shipping a big game solo; the tech logs publish the figures the server actually enforces. The approach is to build a few deep systems that touch everything rather than many shallow ones: the weather engine, the real seafloor and the shared market are the three that carry the game.

It began with a single design rule — if a system doesn't change a decision the player is making, it doesn't ship — and a refusal to fake the sea. That led to a server-owned weather engine, a world cut from real GEBCO bathymetry rather than sculpted terrain, and public odds rolled server-side.

About the developer

Ekin Arca is the solo developer behind Anchor Point and the founder of Whale Dev Studios, the one-person studio he started in Istanbul, Türkiye in 2025. He shipped Reel & Deal on Steam first, and has built Anchor Point alone since — design, code, systems and the world itself. Press enquiries reach him directly at ekinarca40@gmail.com.