itch.io

Haven't watched it but a movie about shooting a storm sounds interesting..

Thanks! Hope you like it :)

Hey there, sorry about that - the links were somehow not added on itch, but I've updated to have them added now!

If there are important updates, I will post here, but since the updates will be made on Steam, I think it might make more sense to post them there. (at least when it comes to game updates and improvements)

Thank you!

Glad you like it!

Yup - leftover wood at the end of a run convert into Planks, a permanent resource for home building. Iron turns into Alloys. These currencies are purely for home building, separate from research tree so they do not conflict.

hmm, a curious and definitely interesting possibility. I want to expand the home island a bit more and perhaps will share a Notion document in a future post on  potential directions I have in mind.

I want this game to have a sort of peaceful vibe after going up against the storm, like retreating into a sort of respite after each battle. So I am building the Home Island into a bigger thing.

Home Island 1.0: Pets (this is done, but needs more work to integrate pets into the game, and people currently don't visit Home Island enough)

Home Island 2.0: Runs will now give permanent items like planks. 

Planks and other permanent currencies can be used to build up your cozy home island.

You can maybe(?) also gain pet food to merge pets and level them up. Rare boxes unlock more epic furniture, skyboxes, island skins.

I will roll some of these out into the free version to give a taste of the experience.

Home Island 3.0: Farming and exploration. Home island is 100% peaceful and a place to rest between runs. Explore the world with no time limit, build a boat. Sail the seas. Go fishing. Whacky ideas: Grow lollipop farms to feed your pets.

Home island 4.0: Open world exploration.

That's a tough one! I will be looking into multiplayer for the home island as a start - eg hanging out with your friends on your home island, being able to see the host's built creations as he modifies them in real time.

For the main game with the storm, it's getting incredibly hard to do multiplayer with the new features added incrementally at the current pace. Unless there's another developer working on the game with me, it's going to be challenging to adapt the current mechanics for multiplayer. I've some a high level analysis of what multiplayer needs to support and here is the list:

• Buildings + Resource production
• Shared inventory items and item counts
• Settler counts + settlers AI (idle vs working) + settlers movements and animations
• Settler professions, school learning progress and status
• Individual settler hunger values
• Pets, pet abilities
• Happiness, electricity values
• Time of day, storm timer
• Storm cloud (sync lightning strikes, destruction of buildings)
• Islands' randomized sequence (likely seeded)
• Island dialogs chosen
• Island outcomes (eg windmill, time pause mechanic)
• Story islands' progress (eg Faraday's clues)
• Special buildings like shields need to sync their times struck, and shatterdomes need to sync their HP value
• Hot air balloon, trader, trader interval, trading items, trading blueprints
• Cards? Building unlocks? World collectibles?
• Sickness mechanic (tundra biome)
• Expeditions, planes (sky biome)
• Structural integrity (underwater biome)
• Quark bonuses selected, quark generation, quark quantities
• Turret bullets, bullet damage, storm HP
• Character traits
• Research levels
• Character accessories and customization appearance

4 maps - there could be more but my main focus is only on four and only these 4 maps will have unique mechanics and story.

I read that TikTok is the way to go now, but since it mainly accepts videos, I've not done it yet.

Thanks for letting me know, there is an error when copying on Web it seems. I'll look into it, sorry about that!

And thanks for the tip for Steam! The storepage takes awhile to approve and set up and I'm super anxious to just get it up asap!

I've decided to keep them! I think it's also easily balanced since the research has a max level, and as more content gets introduced it can even be further increased :)

Thank you for the kind comment Jake! Am still working hard and doing my best to make it better! 😅

just pushed out a fix for collectibles not disappearing. No more infinite wood bug! haha. left the main comment on your video! really appreciate you taking a video of your playthrough and sharing it :DD

OMG I love watching playtests! Will be going through it for sure! And of course yes, please do leave me any feedback as I'm actively working to improve the game every day!

OMG It's Brackeys! Thanks for sharing this!

Ah, I believe I've responded to you in Discord! Thanks for reporting this and for anyone who encounters bugs do let me know about them (for anyone reading, this was resolved in v0.30.1!)

Is that for the blueprint cost? I will increase the blueprint cost from 100 tooth  to 200 if so.

Also I wonder if the turret itself should cost 100 tooth just like the other epic buildings. For now I didn't add that to the build cost as it does have a high teriyaki cost.

Thank you! There'll be more trader researches being cooked up! Some ideas (will add to this post):

1. Get friendship by donating items of higher value - every 1% friendship decrease 0.5% tax (-50% tax at max friendship)
2. Decrease blueprint and epic building tooth cost by 4/8/12/16/20%
3. Permanent epic blueprints (ultra rare and expensive)

I also want to double the number of researches with a new set of research tree branches with all the new mechanics added recently!

Haha Penguin 007 is probably retired from his missions, but maybe he'll return if there's another game jam!

I really like the ideas here! Especially awarding of a bridge style based on the map and the journal unlocks!

Also love the idea of having ice shards instead of lightning on the ice map!

Looks like the game might get a story mode in the end at this rate haha

Ah I see, that's awesome to hear, thanks for letting me know! :)

"The level of it felt good" <- can I know what you mean by level?

Also good idea to add the discord as I hadn't shared its presence officially!

I'm looking forward to adding them! Hoping to give the Home Island play a bigger part in the game too in terms of usefulness too as for now the island is just a visual thing to see your pets roam around haha.

I like the idea of spawning a weak storm to show what it does! That's pretty cool honestly, and solves the problem of people not knowing what the storm does and having to wait 6 minutes to find out. I am weighing between a separate tutorial versus the current in-game tutorial style that lets you continue organically.

Pros of a standalone tutorial like you suggested is the player doesn't feel the need to rush. They can take the time to explore without consequences!

The cons is that people prefer to jump into the main game and a tutorial that forces you to do certain actions just to go through motion and get to the real game can be off-putting. Hmm

You scared me, I thought this was a hate comment from the first sentence HAHA.

This is the first time I've read someone play for 5 hours, this is just crazy wow! if you have anything you want to see in this game - ideas, improvements, feedback. Please let me know as I am working on the game every day and pushing out daily updates to make it better and add more content.

haha whoops, probably will add a tooltip to indicate that the storm never comes on Peaceful difficulty

Thank you Mathur!!

Hey! Just wanted to say congratulations on getting top 20 and even top in audio! Your game is amazing and I recognized it instantly when I saw it, I'm so glad I got to have tried it out :)

Thank you for playing the game and glad to hear all that brainstorming paid off...word play intended! XD

YA I am super surprised and in disbelief lol. I've never won first in anything of this kind before so this is just crazy HAHA

Thank you and glad to have had the opportunity to see you play!!

Cool, watching your stream now and look forward to it! :)

I liked the vibes and music. The fish swimming animation is top notch and I like how the fish's mouth opens in anticipation of the pellet going in, and you even see the pellet going through his body. Very immersive animations.

Also loved the description: You are a fish. You eat pellets. Life is easy. simple haha. Being able to see the storm would be nice but I understand it was scrapped. Nonetheless it ended up being a peaceful relaxing game which is not a bad thing.

Hey there! If you have the time to, it would be awesome if I could see you play my game: https://yyz.itch.io/stormbridge

Rating is optional as at this point I just want to see how others play my game as it is something I don't get to do with online game jams. And I want to learn how to improve from watching playthroughs!

It's a pretty challenging building game, thought I'd warn you haha.

Thank you for the kind comment Justin! Also good job on your game too :)

Hey, thanks for the kind comment and for the feedback! Did you manage to unlock and build the wood farms? Those will give you constant generation of wood, although I heard that since it is a random card-unlockable, I wonder if it's too punishing if you don't get it. I thought I had been quite generous with the amount of wood given by cards but I wonder if I am mistaken?

Haha the storm is meant to be brutal but I am getting mixed comments. Some find it way too easy and build so far ahead of the storm, while others think it's too difficult! I'm going to have a hell of a time balancing this game XD. For now my solution is sorta to provide roguelike permanent upgrades to help each subsequent run. But I do wonder if there are better ways to improve it, like dynamic difficulty, or even the ability to summon the storm at your own pacing.

As for my development process, I'll do a more detailed writeup sometime but you can look at my ideation process here and devlogs if you want to which mention some shortcuts and tricks I used to optimize my effort and re-direct time on areas I wanted to improve on. For this jam, my goal is to focus more on polish and game design, so I had help from external assets. It's also the reason why my iteration style is to upload a playable v0.1 as early as possible. I used that to get initial feedback and then proceeded to iterate on the remaining days to really polish it till v0.5. So while I uploaded the first version after 4 days, I continued to update and iterate on the game every day until the last day. I was also surprisingly invested in the idea so I worked extremely hard on it. It helped that this jam is longer than others. I think I seriously maximized the full week lol. Probably the hardest jam I worked on and I think the results surprised even myself.

Also wanted to add that I'm perhaps on the slightly more experienced side so it's perhaps not fair to compare. I've worked in gamedev but also have animation and extensive 3D background so not only can I put together stuff really quickly, I'm very comfortable working with 3D, lighting, post processing and FX to make a scene pop, making cinematics with Cinemachine and Timeline rapidly, etc, so I have an advantage there. I've also been told that I excel in rapid prototyping, a skillset which seems to come in really handy in scenarios like game jams. 

Lastly, I was lucky to have a very clear vision of my direction which I think helped me plan my time a lot better. Thus, my bottleneck is less of programming and art, but more of game design. I focused on what I felt were high impact features. There were a lot more stuff I wanted but I had to cut them, but I will be gradually adding them into the game after the jam rating period is over, with the first update to put out later today!

Oops sorry I typed so much. I think I get super passionate discussing games and processes and I just went a little ham there X_X

Thank you for the support Jorava!

Right! I'm pretty pumped right now and I'm gonna go for Steam! I'll keep working on it for a couple months I think.  I actually don't know how long I should give myself for this game haha, and probably the hard question will be when  to stop and just launch it on Steam. Hopefully this post ages well :D

Ah I see! In the first option, the storm will need to circle back to the beginning. Currently the storm doesn't do that and only advances, it cannot go back to chase after the buildings that survived, but I wonder if it should. I think only then will the first option be viable.

As for the second option, I think taking more time to destroy the turret just means the storm is stuck there longer as it's like giving it more HP right? It just slightly reduces the reliance on a shield, but it won't be able to shoot behind as it will always get destroyed.

And yep! Tomorrow I will be uploading v0.6, a new version of the game containing Storm HP, new defense buildings, a dash ability (via research), some new research related to the storm, the first island scenario, as well as a lot of rebalancing by making the storm come earlier, and arrive faster each time! I look forward to finally be able to update it! In fact, I'm already working on v0.7 which will release storages :)