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Island Life's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Authenticity (use of resolution restriction) | #90 | 4.563 | 4.563 |
| Visuals | #144 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Gameplay | #145 | 3.125 | 3.125 |
| Overall | #180 | 3.203 | 3.203 |
| Audio | #286 | 1.563 | 1.563 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Two members working as co-developers on program and art. I liked it it were fun.
Was the resolution a challenge?
Somewhat - trying to squeeze an interesting number of tiles in was a real push :)
What did you learn?
To keep shipping and hacking until it was "fun" to play. And that it's not easy to choose a dev team name.
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Comments
Pretty nice. I'm a fan of this kind of sand-boxy build-the-world type game. I made lots of kangaroos, tigers and buffalo, though I've no idea specifically how. :P I did also manage to clear all the desert tiles. I liked it, good job!
Wow, this has Will Wright written all over it. There's certainly room for some interesting possibilities with all of these systems interacting with each other.
Definitely explore this idea further. It would be great if you could wrangle it into more concrete goals
Thanks! I won't lie: played a lot of his stuff when I was younger. It's just as well that we didn't have a PR team, otherwise everyone would be real upset at the pie in the sky ideas in the early design documents. ;P
There's a lot of stuff in them about making animals roam around, having seasons when vegetation grows and dies back, or changing tile type based on latitude, but we kept it simple to get it out in time for the jam.
Relaxing!
Such an enjoyable sandbox game with a sense of progression via unlocks. I'd love to see humans involving in such a game, and we, as the player-god, try to keep the balance in between. Visually everything is understandable and great, and you have nailed the resolution constraint!
Awesome!
I never actually thought of humans originally, but aquila12 suggested it and I'll admit I'm quite taken with the idea. In a similar vein to that kind of angle on a god game, if you haven't seen it you might like to take a look at Reus: cool take on a map and getting the humans to behave is a real challenge!
Cool sandbox game :D I got a Kraken, Mummy, Goat, Giant, Kangaroo, Crab, Koala, and of course, Buffalo. Lots of Buffalo. Neat little game, reminds me of those Doodle God games where you have all the elements, but you need to figure out a way to combine them. I'm a little annoyed that I couldn't fill the entire island with grass (the grass tiles disappeared too fast).
Maybe if you added onto the game, you could have rain make forests on grass. Or when lake tiles are surrounded by lake, they turn into ocean and can spawn fish and stuff. Just some ideas :)
Edit: Saw the screenshots for the game and saw forests... I guess you're already one step ahead of me!
Everybody has lots of buffalo, and that's after I turned the frequency of the damn things down compared to everything else. ;)
As a matter of fact, I did bring up that type of combining gameplay while we were working on this. The grass tiles will tend to die off on the promontories, although like a lot of stuff in this that's emergent from rules that we implemented to produce other behaviour.
Forests do indeed exist, as well as some other terrain that lets you get more varied animals.
Really appreciate the feedback!
Good concept :P it took me a while to figure everything out haha
:) I loved the simple gameplay, it fits the jam theme :)
Great job :D
I’ll admit, it took me some time to warm up to this game. I still don’t fully understand what would cause certain animals to appear. But seeing my island fill up with buffalo and then giants was super cool. I appreciate that you embraced the tiny 7x7 tiles.
Here’s my finished(?) island – buffalo grasslands to the north and a big colony of giants to the southwest.
Neat idea
An interesting little simulation, I ended up with kangaroos and giants and buffalo on my island. I see a lot of potential with the ways different tiles could interact, a system that rewards with new environment actions over time would be really cool. Maybe uncovering new creatures through an encyclopedia and learning what environment behaviors spawn them.
I got an island of Elk and Kangaroos... would be pretty weird sight to see if there was an island like that.
It seems like it could be interesting, and I did manage to get some animals to appear. Although to be honest, I'm not really sure what I should be doing? It could be helpful if you give a bit more information on how to play the game.
Thanks RJ :) it's a bit of a sandbox, but we probably could have done a bit more explanation on the game page for sure.