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I lost 2 weeks.

Stack Island - Survival card game
A downloadable Stack Island for Windows and macOS

I lost two weeks.

I'm creating a survival card game. It's not complete, but I've made an alpha version that is playable to some extent.

Creating a game alone is really difficult. I don't have anyone nearby to ask for help, and it's also financially challenging. There's a lot to do, and it's hard to improve the quality as much as I want.

'Stack Island' is a survival game, but the player character is not visible on the screen and everything in the environment is represented by cards. It can be played in a similar way to the popular game 'Stacklands', but the content is closer to real survival. The game involves exploring an uninhabited island, collecting coconuts, setting traps to hunt animals, making clothes and bags, and building a boat to escape the island. Unexpected situations can lead to death, and it's a roguelike game where you have to start from the beginning after dying.

I've made a lot of considerations and created the current game, but I'm still thinking about a lot of things. Is the pace of the game too slow? Is the card combination not intuitive enough? Is it difficult to find the next objective?

As I was organizing the unfinished game bit by bit, I came up with a new goal that I need to tackle immediately. It's a program structure change that doesn't feel very rewarding even when finished. The reason for this decision was the existence of stages.

Anyway, while trying to modify the code to add stages, I encountered a huge bug, and I regretted it. This often happens when making a game alone, but it's not a pleasant experience. Each time, I realize that I need to be more meticulous in my design at the beginning. But it's a repeating process. :)

So two weeks have disappeared like that.

The state of the game two weeks ago and now is the same. The only thing that has changed is that I can now add new escape content after escaping. I also fixed some bugs.

Those two weeks were very long.

It gives me energy to see the game evolve on the screen. The most difficult part of solo game development is creating things that aren't visible on the screen. It was a really long two weeks.

Now I'm going to start refining the game again. :)

Hang in there, everyone!

Files

  • DEMO_StackIsland_2day_0.552_macOS.app.zip 74 MB
    Mar 09, 2023
  • DEMO_StackIsland_2day_0.552_windows.zip 66 MB
    Mar 09, 2023
Download Stack Island - Survival card game
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