This one was surprising! Felt kind of FTL-ish in terms of the branching map and two ships battling against eachother with weapons on timers. It's definitely worth continuing this one, so improved art and refined mechanics and you would certainly have something!
The UI was a bit confusing, I didn't figure out how to attach my new cannon that I got on my second fight (a !! fight, was super challenging for early game but it felt great to succeed). If there was a way to keep all the available things on the same menu, it would have been a lot clearer, and I wouldn't have struggled as much. I figured it out before the penultimate battle when I got a second engine.
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Thanks! I also took quite a bit of inspiration from FTL while making this (Slay the Spire was the other one).
Great idea to keep all the items on one menu. It would definitely make the building less confusing and also easier since you don't have to switch back and forth to find the things you need.
When you mentioned refined mechanics, what exactly were you thinking though? Could it be more along the lines of moving the weapons into more distinct roles with room for strategy and counter play? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how to go about doing this better.
Thanks once again for your feedback! It means a ton to me, especially in the early development of this game.
Well, there are a lot of things that could be done. There's a lot of room to expand your core game. Here are some ideas off the top of my head, feel free to accept or reject any of it.
- Room for more interesting weapons. Right now all the weapons I saw would fire in straight lines. A weapon may fire in an arc and be able to hit the top of the island. Or weapons that target specific tiles and have slight homing.
- The intro suggests people live on these islands, Having population could be a possible mechanic. Population could effect the cooldown timers, if you have a lot of people things go more quickly. Having a block of your island blown off could lose some population. People could be something that you find in events on the map. People could also act as raiding parties to the other island.
- FTL had lots of story wrapped up in its map. Story events could lead to fights where you have the choice to engage or not, crew, various weapons and items for your ship. More story events give players a reason to replay.
- FTL had a bunch of unlockable ships that changed up the play style. Made he want to keep replaying to unlock them all and explore how they changed things up. Would be a good idea to explore.
- Fuel that limits how much you can explore of the map, and becomes a resource.
You've got a fun core game that's relatively unique, but it's short and relatively simple right now. There's a lot of room for it to grow into something that people would want to keep returning. Have fun with it!
Wow! Thanks for putting all of this down.
Different kind of weapons are definitely on my radar of things to add in. You will find some mortars, rail guns and penetrating plasmas, wind to blow projectile back and ion weapons that go through shields as you go throughout the game though. Ido have to work on the game balance to make it less harsh and punishing though, since some player never got around to seeing these things.
I love the idea of population. Having different species could also get interesting and then maybe making them work around in different places could be cool as well.
With regards to the story, I really really wanted to have events in this release, but I ran out of time. The unknown points on the map were supposed to be more of the story aspect and from there add in little story elements to normal locations. I totally agree the story point give players a reason to play, since they would be discovering the story as they went along over different runs.
Speaking of different runs, starting islands would be a cool way to reward the player for progressing in difficulty. Im thinking of trying to get a way to reward the player at the end of a run with an item or block that would get added to every preceding run.
Fuel is something that I have played around with. At first, my idea for fuel was to explore the map. But then I created a linear map where you cannot go downward. This eliminated the need for fuel. So then naturally, I added fuel into the battle. You had fuel tanks that would store fuel and replenish every battle, but this made the game awful and not much fun. So I just removed fuel completely. I also was thinking of ammunition as a resource, but I didn't go through with it. From the sounds of it, it seems like it would be better to have more permanent resources that persist outside the battle.
Thanks so much again for taking the time to write all of this out. I really appreciate it.