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Emerald Woods

You have started a new life in the tranquil Emerald Woods, miles away from any sign of human civilization. · By Slashie, QuietGecko

My impressions

A topic by Paweł Ślusarczyk created Mar 16, 2020 Views: 629 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(1 edit)

Nice game :)

At first glance it looked to me like a roguelike version of Don't Starve (but more chilled out, contrary to typical games in this genre).

Interesting how the sounds play with typical roguelike look — it's a nice mixture and it's making it easier to understand what's going on.

The world is big and it's not easy to find the way back home or to explore new places. Maybe some system of navigation would be useful. Might something as simple as a minimap or maybe some signs or magnetic field emitters you can construct in various places and then use an item (compass?) which would tell you what direction they are at.

Maybe I was too lazy or too little curious, but didn't feel like growing plants is very important for me since I had enough nutrition from berries. I was missing an overall goal like preparation for survival or for exploring a dangerous place.

A few UI annoyances:

  • I'm not sure how to easily quit the construction menu. I automatically press Escape which makes me leave the full screen.
  • Much of the screen space is wasted. Even with full screen, the game takes only half of it and the sides are also empty. Fortunately it's part of the website, so I can just use browser zoom.

Thanks Paweł!

I haven't played Don't Starve, but I could see how the game could be similar to other survival games. But indeed, it is intended to be chill and not very stressing. The challenge is of course making it fun without a strong pressure or sense of imminent peril, I continue working on that :)

For this game I made the mistake (yet again) of believing "getting lost" would be a fun thing for player (or rather, trying not to get lost without any external aid). That just doesn't work... players will never manually map the world like they maybe used to do it in the old times. I'm planning to add some "waypoint" thing, which could be justified as the player referencing some landmarks.

All other points have been noted and added to the tracker. Thanks!

Ha, making a map on a piece of paper came to my mind, but I eventually didn't do it. Why? Probably because of a thought that the game shouldn't demand it from me in these modern UX times. Wonder if I'll ever make such a map again.

moved this topic to Ideas for Improvement