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Looks like we had similar ideas for the game! Although your map and sprites look much better, I had to rush some programmer art and never had the time to improve later.

Some notes that I took:

  • The whole game, but especially the UI has an old-school vibe. My first thought was that the UI takes too much space, but I ended up liking it, I think it reminded me of playing Warcraft 2 back in the day.
  • The reveal of the map was really cool and seamless, I'd like to know about how you implemented it if you're open to share details.
  • Great choice of sound effects, it was nice to have feedback on all actions.
  • When the enemies die, I think there is too much delay. When I shot a human, at first I wasn't sure if it died or I need to shoot more, it seemed to move after playing the sound effect but before the sprite disappeared. Same goes for the bear, but it even managed to hit me after I shot it, even though it already dropped some meat. Maybe this was intentional, but it felt a bit confusing to me as a player.
  • I liked the transition between sea and land movement. In my game, you need to press a separate key for that, but I'll probably implement something similar afte the jam.

Finally, great choice of narrative framework, I'll go and listen to the song by Stan Rogers now. :)

(+1)

Thanks for your feedback! I had similar concerns about the UI midway through development but then decided to lean into it after spending a while playtesting and ended up liking the way it restricted overall view a little. The delay for the polar bears is intentional, I was actually having an issue with the way my code base spawned their drop and tried to solve it through slashing their movement speed and having them die for a second while still moving towards you. Although I'm not sure that landed quite how I intended it initially.  In the future I'd probably end up creating a global audio manager instead of having the audio linked to individual instances of enemies to simplify my code honestly. The transition I handled through adding a bool data value to water and transition tiles and having character bodies check whether over_water=true before starting their loop, which helped to keep the trappers over land and trigger my animation transitions on movement.


As for the map reveal, that involved more troubleshooting that I'd like to admit haha. But I took a screenshot of my total Playable area, and had a global script track player position compared to total map size to get a percentage value of how far they had traveled, then have that update my player marker and my reveal circle. The screenshotted map was underneath a texture that I updated by creating a transparent section at the point of reveal. With that I had to dial it in for quite a while because my math was wrong initially and nothing was lining up 😅

That sounds like a fun challenge! Follow-up question: how do you determine if the exploration is completed (aka the win condition)? Does the player have to only reach the finish point, or do you require a % mapping of the righ path?

(+1)

The win condition was set based on the expeditions that inspired the game, so as long as you successfully navigate through the Northwest passage (pacific to atlantic through the arctic), you get the win screen. I tried to give a bit of an in game hint on the map as well with the dotted like sketched across from the start to finish, but after playing some other titles I realize I could have made the progression direction a bit more clear.