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Lighthouse - The Storm Shepard's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #31 | 3.944 | 3.944 |
| Graphics | #100 | 4.148 | 4.148 |
| Innovation | #109 | 3.611 | 3.611 |
| Overall | #153 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
| Theme | #250 | 3.537 | 3.537 |
| Game Design | #265 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Fun | #672 | 2.815 | 2.815 |
Ranked from 54 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You are a novice lighthouse keeper in a post-apocalyptic world where the entire continental America got destroyed by a nuclear experiment gone wrong.
The shockwave of the explosion caused a massive tsunami that flooded most of Europe and Africa and Asia.
You are one of the few survivors and you have to keep the lighthouse running as another storm is looming on the horizon.
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
The game was made entirely from scratch, including the code and assets and even the engine itself.
We are using just HTML/Svelte and TypeScript/JavaScript and (S)CSS.
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Comments
The graphics are really nice ! The view with the lighthouse lighting the waters just blew my mind, it's really a gorgeous piece of art !
I also really like the concept of the game ! Love the idea of managing merchant ships to make a profit while getting yourself ready for the storm ! The boat speed and selection could be improved, and it would be nice to actually see how much any of the item are selling or bought for, but the idea is there and the atmosphere is quite great !
Great job !
Thank you for the feedback. :D
The starter boats are made slow to encourage to player to buy more boats & start a fleet, in play-testing the faster boats meant people just beat the game with 1. Buying a new boat in the lighthouse will give you boats up to 3x speed of stock.
We will be looking into adding buying & selling prices to shops in the post jam update, along with a few bugfixes & QoL.
Thanks for checking out the game, and glad you liked the atmosphere. :D
I was in bed, enjoying my rest and suddenly i had a link to an itch page shoved down by throat, held at gunpoint and screamed at...
They wanted my time and attention.. though worst of all... a piece of my mind.
So here i give it:
This game at present has its flaws, the awkward selection on settlements if the boat slips under and some movement issues, though i believe its due to the heavy limitations of it's current platform.
There is a good start to the world building and lore of the game, it is easy to see how this can turn into a kind of a strategy colony sim/ settlement builder game with the light house/-es at the center of it and especially so with the threat of the storm looming in closer with every passing day.
Preparing for the coming storm in the current game makes me feel like i am managing a supply line to ensure my survival and yet it gives me the impression of a colony survival fantasy where your supply lines and stockpile determine the survival of the colony in a world where water level is rising and people are increasingly more seaborne for resource gathering, light houses would be detrimental to survival as a historic figure of navigation, guidance and avoiding danger. I will stop with this here before i get carried away with my thoughts.
The intro of the game gives me the impression of the previous lighthouse keeper as a mad man, why is he so sane afterwards when it is his time to leave and keep tabs on you after you seemingly throw him off in a cage in new rome? At least it looks like he is caged in the cargo transfer screen. The story needs a bit of work, polishing and it can be very captivating and immersive.
I felt like the controls could have been explained better yet i have nothing better to suggest as of writing.
The game needs an economy system.. At the very least a basic price board and a better settlement trade resource generation.
At the time of writing there is nothing to tell you how much will something buy or sell for, all you know is that you will buy something and then sell it for more somewhere else. After playing the game a few times I noticed sometimes a case of being able to buy a certain goods like driftwood and then there isnt any settlement on the map buying it which if i just started playing and bought it all i wouldnt have any money left over which leads to another concern, there is no way to refund or cancel a purchase or sale which i believe is either due to a coding limitation or a lack of development time.
The settlements could display goods they buy or sell from a pooled amount of buyable and sellable goods, potentially taking into consideration the distance between settlements and the deals could rotate based on time progressing, alternatively have the deals be static but manually distributed evenly between all settlements and have a singular non changing map which could let players plan and set up stable routes without needing to worry about a deal/demand change in the future, splitting their attention.
Maybe you want there to be chaos and keep people on their toes and have a settlement consistently buying soup, suddenly crave for bricks and candles and not export any wood anymore.
I could go on but then the comment/review may get way too long. So to summarise:
The potential for this game is MASSIVE, YUUGE, big big BIG.
Depending on the scope this game could rival the likes of Frostpunk, the ANNO series and Surviving Mars.
I hope to see this game evolve.
I am sorry to whoever read to this point.
:3
The visual and audio effects for the game are really impressive (especially given the time constraints and considering HOW MANY there are). The slower pace of the early game didn't land for me personally, but I still think it's a solid game design choice as it fits the narrative. Probably the best thing about this IS the narrative. I loved the journal at the beginning with the scribbles of the old lighthouse keeper! Also not sure if this happened by random accident, but I got my boat stuck inside a port somehow, and as if by magic after trying to navigate it away from shore it seemed like the waves eventually just pushed me back to sea?? So well done on preparing for that issue! Overall, I'm really inspired by what you all were able to create this week.
Thanks for the feedback <3
We put a lot of effort into a polished interactive story & tutorial as it was one of the main pieces of feedback I got on my previous 2 jam entries. :D We also went all out in adding SFX to almost every interaction in the game, it made it feel so much better!
Glad you enjoyed the visual novel aspect of our game, took a lot of fiddling to get the journal to work using CSS xd.
I didn't really understand the controls, so it was hard to play. The ship didn't really want to move where i wanted it to, and moved slowly when it did. And then at some point I died without really understanding why. It definitely has a cool vibe though.
Everything is done with mouse / touch controls, you can tap the boat so it glows red, after you start drawing a path ( mouse-down & move ) If you release the boat will try follow the path. Hitting land however will make you crash, you die if you run out of boats & have no money to buy new ones, you win if you manage to prepare the lighthouse for the next storm.
The art & sound team did a great job in setting the vibe & atmosphere. <3
If you need any help feel free to contact me on Discord. :D
made all in HTML/Svelte... thats crazy
Svelte & HTML & Typescript for gamedev OP! :P
I rated almost every catagory 5 stars because most aspects of this game land perfectly. Perfect sound design, great art and even the voice acting was awesome.
The only gripe I have is with the gameplay. This could be a consequence of this kind of game not being my cup of tea, but the boat is extremely slow and watching it slowly sail to different ports got a bit lame. Still, great job on everything else :)
Thanks for playing & the awesome rating :D <3 <3
Tip from the dev, try going for like 4 & 5 boats suddenly they'll go too fast! :o As the boat you start with is 1/2 - 1/3'rd the stat total of boats you buy.
Again thanks for the great ratings :P
I had a bit of trouble playing the game, the ship just kind of floated off doing its own thing and no amount of clicking or dragging could fix it.
Im going to come back to this one tomorrow so i can give it a fair rating (pretty sure im the problem).
Love the jam page, love the voice acting. The news papers were really cool too. Can tell your all very passionate about what your doing good job on submitting for the jam!
Feel free to reply with some pointers so i can figure it out :P
Some pointers from me : Tap the boat once ( glows red ) and start drawing a line towards a port don't overlap with the boat sprite you don't have to :) Try getting a 2nd boat going quickly Itt'l double resource gathering speed.
Thanks for the compliments on the art story & voice-acting <3 We absolutely loved working on this project; even put in an allnighter to iron out a lot of code before submitting today :D ( if you need any additional info / help feel free to add me on Discord )
Love the voice acting, and I felt the story, art and music were well crafted. I felt that the one thing missing from this game was either a mini game you could play after your boat's course is set or a way to speed up travel after you chart your course. Otherwise, great work!
I was just able to beat the jam version, once you start having 4 boats around there's no time for minigames! :P
Lot of feedback I got on previous jams was about story & tutorial, so we put a lot of focus and polish into that for this jam, really happy you enjoyed our writing. <3
When recording the lines I was cringing so hard at myself thinking it was going to flop haha
but I'm glad you liked the voice acting!
A very well-made game, graphics and audio are so good. i loved the voice acting and the cutscenes. Gameplay and UI wise a bit lacking but thats fine.
very well made 8/10
It's a really cool game! It's a little slow in the beginning, but deffinitely something I could poor a lot of time in. Am looking forwards to see what it will bring when playing it more.
It's a slow start but once you get 2 / 3 ships going it speeds up really fast! :D
Thanks for playing our game! <3 If you manage to beat it please share the final time it took you to prepare for the storm :o
The audio design is great and some of the art looks stunning. I would definitely pay more attention to the fonts, try to stick to 1 max 2 different fonts and avoid the default Unity font!
Thanks for checking out the game <3
We are using 3 fonts, one of them is only used on the main title. "convincing_pirate"
"black_chancery" we are using as a fancy names font for the boats & "manus_magnifico" we are using as a pixel writing font.
Bit confused about the default Unity font comment as we are not using a game engine at all, all is written in just HTML JS & CSS ( check inspect element :P ).
But for accessibility reasons we allowed "manus_magnifico" to be switched out to your default system font. :D For you that might be the Unity font you were talking about.
In hindsight probably should have used another fallback font for accessibility, It's something we can look at a future jam.
hm, i was sure that was the Unity font xd. Its for all the text such as the description of the newspapers on the bottom of the screen. Props to you for making this without a game engine, really impressive. My point was just that it looks a bit messy with different font styles, and a singular style would be more seamless. Thank you for such a detailed reply!