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Merchant of Nevis's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Authenticity (Use of 64x64 limit) | #34 | 4.714 | 4.714 |
| Graphics | #77 | 3.714 | 3.714 |
| Overall | #117 | 3.161 | 3.161 |
| Enjoyment | #123 | 2.786 | 2.786 |
| Audio | #180 | 1.429 | 1.429 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Took a little bit to get used to the controls.. the wind blowing the wrong way while getting out the first dock didn't help much!
But yes, looks like a good base to build off of!
Thanks! Yeah, the wind is entirely random so it can sometimes be blowing in an extremely unfavourable direction for leaving the first port - maybe it shouldn't be able to do that.
I definitely like the look of this game. and I'm a big fan of similar games. I wasn't so put off by the control scheme, more just the physics, it felt like it should be a little more responsive/arcade-like. And the land is quite distracting, everything looks so smooth and clean then you have these big squares of land. But, it definitely feels like a base for something greater. And I remember a post of yours on Twitter regarding layered sprites? The effect works really well and I'd like to know more about your method (or should I just Google, lol?)
Yeah, I actually made the ship specifically slow to manoeuvre in some, possibly misguided, quest for accuracy when I first started development and I probably should've dropped that feature! I entirely agree that the land is terrible, truth be told I ran out of time to do anything more than that unfortunately. Regarding the ships, it's pretty simple really. You draw a set of top-down sprites that represent slices through the object, then offset each slice from the bottom up by -1 in the Y direction. You then just have them maintain their relative position to each other and rotate together. That's probably a terrible explanation! I've pointed people in the direction of this tutorial before, it's specific to gamemaker though (which I don't actually use) but might be helpful: http://www.like100bears.com/writing/2d-3d-in-gamemaker-studio :) Thanks for playing and running the jam!
It's a really neat effect. Some games are just rendering in 3d and down scaling it, that doesn't look so good. This method probably takes a little more effort, but the result is 3d-esque but super clear/not jaggedy, certainly worth the effort. I definitely want to try and use this technique at some point. I did already have an idea of the process, but thanks for the link, it never hurts to see how other people approach the same problem. :)
Neat concept! I included it in my LowRezJam compilation, if you’d like to take a look :)
Very ambitious game for a jam! Boat animations and the telescope option were amazing. I really enjoyed sailing and navigating around. It was a little hard to understand what I was doing, and the game loop itself lacked some structure, but I think that's something you could easily fix if you had more time. Only other thing would be to think about your control scheme... it felt a little unnatural to go from two hands on the keyboard to mouse when trading.
Thanks so much for you kind words - I think it was probably too ambitious! I entirely agree that it's rather unstructured and unintuitive right now. There definitely needs to be some in-game guidance and explanation, especially at the start. I also originally intended to have keyboard control for the trading overlay but decided I could implement mouse control much quicker so just went with that - it's certainly not ideal.
Cool game very interesting, maybe the gameplay could be a little bit more intuitive, and I missed some sounds, but it is very cool, the art is very good.
Thanks!