This game is really fun and I see a whole lot of potential in it! It's challenging, has some charm, and I see a lot of areas for expansion.
It reminds me somewhat of the board game The 7th Continent (if you've ever tried that!), about discovering tiles and harsh survival conditions.
The UI / UX and gameplay already feels pretty good, so I only have minor nitpick, thoughts, and potential ideas for expansion.
- I love that everything is a single click to do, very quick and satisfying to play with.
- Would be cool to see a "preview" of the resulting food / water / time whenever you hover on something. (When playing I tend to ignore the numbers written on the tiles while focusing on "what resources I have left", so if the bottom UI bar could also reflect the costs it would be nice)
- I wasn't sure how to close the tutorial tips at the very start (not a major issue but I did accidently start with picking up a tile.
- I think there is potential to have some really cool upgrades (if they don't already exist and I just haven't seen them). Some ideas - you have the option to jump over an empty tile, backtracking 1 tile costs no time, villages spawn more frequently, if you run out of water / food, you can use the other resource to cover for it, new tiles dropped are guaranteed to have 1 animal, etc.
- I agree with the other commentor that creating islands is subject to a lot of RNG. II have a few more ideas that could help with that. Could allow the option to rotate the islands, which would help a lot with those "single tile gaps". A more drastic change would be to let the player know what the next tile will look like, tetris style (and maybe with the option to refresh / discard the tile), so they can plan ahead a tiny bit.
- In the style of 7th Continent (and a whole lot of work to implement), i'd love to see multi-tile quests. Maybe a village needs help catching some wolf nearby (and another compass marker would pop up), or you find a lost villager and can bring them back to their village for a reward, etc, etc. I think that would be fun but understand that it's a whole lot of work haha.
- Very occasionally I go a bit fast and accidently start creating an island instead of moving and the current design doesn't allow us to cancel that action (since know we know what the island looks like!). Some awkwardness there but not sure what could help with that.
But overall it is really awesome, you have a great eye for simplistic design and I see a bright future for this game! Keep it up!