Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Rogue Sea is an entertaining if slightly frustrating pirate game about gathering coconuts in increasingly difficult seas. Controls are pretty intuitive and the game on the whole looks and functions pretty well, if a little slow when zoomed out in particular. It gets some points for innovation because of the relatively intuitive aesthetic of "playing as a large multi-tile object" but the frustration of frequent softlocks kept this reviewer from giving it a full fun score. The game does warn players that this is possible to do; still, it might have been better to give them a way (perhaps by sacrificing health) to leave the softlocked situation, or even to warn or prevent them from getting into it to start with. There is a fairly easy trick to avoiding it, which I won't spoil here, though it may not be easy to pull off if you're trying to shake another pirate off your tail. Avoiding other ships is a little fun, but the varying difficulty of different generations and randomly chosen goals among the islands makes for a bit of a balance issue. It is also not clear whether it is by design that you don't know which islands will be able to heal you or rearm you with more cannonballs. Having some hint might have been helpful.
• This game is a different experience, and I appreciate that from a roguelike. The concept is really interesting, the name generation is amusing, and the mechanics all work as expected. The idea of procedural islands and ascii ships is great. The ships going on their own adventures makes a nice little world. The combat requires careful positioning, as you might expect from ship combat, but it does takes some getting used to. I wish there were one or two more options for the player in combat, as it can be extremely difficult to defeat enemy ships that have it out for you. I would also like to see a faster cannon animation, as you sometimes have to wait on your turn while combat occurs in the corner of your screen. This idea could be expanded into something pretty neat, maybe with different ship types, different goals, a larger map... it makes you think about the possibilities.
• Rogue Sea is full of pirate talk, with all the "Y'arr"s, "matey"s, "Shiver me timbers" and the like you could ask for in its instructions and log. Yet, it feels very little like being a pirate - unless you believe that dutifully following compass directions from island to island in the search of coconuts, of all things, all while constantly running out of cannonballs if you dare to fight, is what pirate life was really about. Going from one target island whose name is always written on your UI to another 4 times, getting rewarded with a bigger ship and a larger map, and then doing it 2 more times, is all that's needed to beat the game. The combat is present, and it's non-modal, too: even if you are not in combat, you'll still often hear cannonfire and splashes/timbers breaking from other ships infighting for reasons only known to themselves. Yet, all the fun is lost due to the need to regularly sail to one specific island out of many around in order to be able to shoot once again. You may well not manage to complete a single shootout without having to retreat (or worse - search for) cannonball island, which are impossible to tell apart on the map from any other island. Same issue applies to the repair islands, but at least they are more frequent. Your one advantage is that the hostile AI are bad shots, and are prone to shoot in spite of their target being blocked by an island - or even straight up get stuck on islands and end up utterly helpless and easy pickings. While you are technically rewarded for collecting coconuts by being awarded larger ships and encouraged to fight more, it's actually much easier to fight with the starting ship, as the cannonball island is much faster to get to, and larger ships getting a couple more cannonballs and HP is more than offset by them being far more cumbersome and easier targets for the AI. In fact, being larger can even make it more likely that a non-hostile ship runs into you and forces you to wait in place for several turns to get unstuck - and if you want to just blast it apart, you may well not have enough cannonballs left for that. In all, while it's nice to see multiple submissions devoted to the Golden Age of Piracy, Rogue Sea requires substantial rethinking in order to match the level of at least the other entries.
• Seemed a little rough around the edges. Had some confusion from duplicate island names, got squished between an island and another ship with no way to get out, hard to tell what you'll get from which island. The core idea is interesting and I think it could be developed further.