Pretty nice. I'm a fan of this kind of sand-boxy build-the-world type game. I made lots of kangaroos, tigers and buffalo, though I've no idea specifically how. :P I did also manage to clear all the desert tiles. I liked it, good job!
Play game
Island Life's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Authenticity (use of resolution restriction) | #90 | 4.563 | 4.563 |
| Visuals | #144 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Gameplay | #145 | 3.125 | 3.125 |
| Overall | #180 | 3.203 | 3.203 |
| Audio | #286 | 1.563 | 1.563 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Two members working as co-developers on program and art. I liked it it were fun.
Was the resolution a challenge?
Somewhat - trying to squeeze an interesting number of tiles in was a real push :)
What did you learn?
To keep shipping and hacking until it was "fun" to play. And that it's not easy to choose a dev team name.
Comments
Thanks! I won't lie: played a lot of his stuff when I was younger. It's just as well that we didn't have a PR team, otherwise everyone would be real upset at the pie in the sky ideas in the early design documents. ;P
There's a lot of stuff in them about making animals roam around, having seasons when vegetation grows and dies back, or changing tile type based on latitude, but we kept it simple to get it out in time for the jam.
2 years ago(+1)
I never actually thought of humans originally, but aquila12 suggested it and I'll admit I'm quite taken with the idea. In a similar vein to that kind of angle on a god game, if you haven't seen it you might like to take a look at Reus: cool take on a map and getting the humans to behave is a real challenge!
Everybody has lots of buffalo, and that's after I turned the frequency of the damn things down compared to everything else. ;)
As a matter of fact, I did bring up that type of combining gameplay while we were working on this. The grass tiles will tend to die off on the promontories, although like a lot of stuff in this that's emergent from rules that we implemented to produce other behaviour.
Forests do indeed exist, as well as some other terrain that lets you get more varied animals.
Really appreciate the feedback!
I’ll admit, it took me some time to warm up to this game. I still don’t fully understand what would cause certain animals to appear. But seeing my island fill up with buffalo and then giants was super cool. I appreciate that you embraced the tiny 7x7 tiles.
Here’s my finished(?) island – buffalo grasslands to the north and a big colony of giants to the southwest.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.