Fearless Islands by Mattias Cibien

[raw]
made by Mattias Cibien for Ludum Dare 45 (JAM)

In Feareless Islands you are a humble miner that must escape his homeland before it gets invaded by the orcs. In order to achieve this you must travel through the land and fight different foes in order to reach the ship that will lead our hero away.

Gameplay

Every fight is a card game match that, in case of victory, rewards the humble miner with more equipment to use in the next fights.

The twist is that you start ill-equipped with nothing more than yourself, your fists and your clothes.

Will you be able to help our humble miner? Be careful, though, not winning a fight means that you have to start over again, losing everything you got.

Screenshots

Screenshot<em>20191007</em>220723.png Fight with a treant

Screenshot<em>20191007</em>220439.png Bandits are bad, really bad

Screenshot<em>20191007</em>220336.png Your equipment collection

Screenshot<em>20191007</em>220304.png Do you prefer slimes? In this game we have Giant Toads.

What to expect from this game

  • Pleasant graphics
  • Engaging strategic gameplay
  • Different foes to fights
  • Bugs ☹️ (we tried hard to squeeze all of them out, but this is Software Development, not Science)

Credits

  • Additional sound effects from https://www.zapsplat.com
  • Music from https://freepd.com/

Changelog

v4:

  • Fixed critical problem in scrolling the card collection dialog

v3:

  • Initial public release

Ratings

Given 11🗳️ 9🗨️

Feedback

Torami
08. Oct 2019 · 14:31 UTC
Hi the game is fantastic, the sound is really cool, but i dont see how it comes to the theme.
Andori_Paic
08. Oct 2019 · 14:55 UTC
I love the Idea, probably too much random in a game, that break the fun and the strategy give by a card game.
LadyVardoula
08. Oct 2019 · 15:00 UTC
It's well put together. I might come back and play some more. Life is bottom left of the card, but what is bottom right?
Antti Haavikko
08. Oct 2019 · 15:16 UTC
Met my doom on the hands of the treant. Luck just wasn't on my side, I kept missing and they just kept pummeling me with criticals.

The look was great. Especially the cards and UI components, the map view was a bit bland in comparison. The combat log messages not fitting the boxes was quite off-putting. And in my opinion, the messages scrolled the wrong way and could have been cleared each round to lessen the confusion about what happened and when. And they were too fast to follow anyway, I just watched the numbers on the cards. And I still have no clue what the right side number on the cards means. Or what is the difference between normal attack and magic attack.

Loads of typos that made the game more seem less professional and more confusing than it needed to be. For example, it should be "magic", "reduce x by y" and I still have no what the sandals even do. I'm guessing they give more evasion. And speaking of which, do the defence and evasion boosts stack à la Pokemon or are they completely useless and per round?

![fearlessislands.png](///raw/1e4/3/z/28d1f.png)

The combat wasn't deep enough to be fun really. At least in the beginning (dunno how long the game is though). Might be that I just scratched the surface looking at the empty feats window but every new card was the same but (maybe) just a bit more powerful. The combat felt like rock paper scissors where rock beats everything but it doesn't work half of the time. And sometimes the rock of your opponent is just bigger than yours. And requiring two button clicks (and buttons that weren't even close to each other) wasn't necessary. Why would one need to change their mind after clicking a card once? Think if you're playing solitaire and after every move, a dialog appeared and made sure you intended to do the move.

Anyways, might seem like I'm only criticizing but that's not the case, you sure weren't lying about the pleasant graphics and the game in itself seemed quite bugless. It's just the actual combat gameplay mechanic that needs more depth and polish. Good job!
Vodlion
08. Oct 2019 · 15:28 UTC
I love card games and the art is nice, but there are some big problems. The randomness takes too much place in fights.
I guess that the problem comes from the lack of time to balance things so... Could be a really fun game with more time.
🎤 Mattias Cibien
08. Oct 2019 · 18:34 UTC
Thanks everybody for the feedback, in particular to @antti-haavikko for the detailed description. We will surely provide some fixes to that. Reading descrptions with a clearer mind surely helps finding mistakes and we will definitely improve them (not sure if they can count as a bug-fix for the jam, though).

We will likely write a postmortem when the voting period ends to tell our story in developing the game.

Anyway, thank you all for all the feedback. This means a lot to us and will help us plan the next phase of the game accordingly.

You can also post suggestions, bugs and question on the official community on itch. We will be glad to have everyone on board: https://codinggeronimo.itch.io/fearless-islands/community

@antti-haavikko: for the treant fight we suggest that you keep dodging and defend until you get an attack that can inflict more than a total of 4 dmg.

A quick explaination: defending will reduce the damage inflicted by the enemy while evading will prevent all damage. Both of them must succeed in order to obtain the effect. They do not stack though as the card is accounted only for the given round.
Antti Haavikko
08. Oct 2019 · 18:40 UTC
Oh I see, I didn't realize that all three cards change each round. That adds a bit of strategy but still very reliant on RNG since you can still miss or roll bad damage. And if you can fully evade, what's the point of defending then?
🎤 Mattias Cibien
08. Oct 2019 · 18:58 UTC
@antti-haavikko: if you fail evasion instead of zeroing damage you get more damage.
🎤 Mattias Cibien
09. Oct 2019 · 12:59 UTC
@andori-paic: it should fit the theme as you start only using your own bare hands in the first combat and you start to get equipment only after the first fight.
Tommyflower
11. Oct 2019 · 16:48 UTC
Beautiful graphics! The fight lacks some visual and /or sound feedback. For instance you could highlight the last line of the log to make better understand what's going on, or mark misses and wins with different sounds or colours, otherwise long battles become a little boring and less interactive. Also showing some more feedback on the dice result (be it number or text) would help. Hust ideas. Keep up with this!
Geckoo1337
12. Oct 2019 · 21:15 UTC
Impressive work on the aesthetic. I am not a big fan of card games, but yours is really well done. Thanks ++
🎤 Mattias Cibien
15. Oct 2019 · 08:29 UTC
Thanks @geckoo1337 and @tommyflower. We will definetely investigat more in user friendliness for the next release. We received a lot of feedback on this and therefore we will surely try to make a more pleasant experience.
paulhocker
16. Oct 2019 · 03:26 UTC
there is some parts i like about this game and some parts i don't -- i loved the artwork and the concept of a card games mixed with exploring -- however it was very slow paced and too much randomeness -- go godot! thanks for making this
karlipoppins
23. Oct 2019 · 07:42 UTC
Amazing graphics and awesome polish on the animations / audio. I couldn't get passed the treant (died every time during my 3 attempts) so unfortunately I didn't go further than the forest :( Wish I could have played this some more. This could be a great tablet game! Awesome job!
AtomFox0213
26. Oct 2019 · 01:07 UTC
I can't play it, as it throws an error that I’ve gotten when trying to play other games made in Godot about GPU drivers not being up to date or GPU being too old, probably because I’m on a ~7 year old laptop with integrated graphics :/
🎤 Mattias Cibien
26. Oct 2019 · 10:13 UTC
Can you post the error on the official forum https://codinggeronimo.itch.io/fearless-islands alongside the specs of your laptop?