Robo Island by JoeShanahan
Build robots, perform research, uncover the island, and restore the communications tower to receive "The Signal!"

Merge 3 identical items to create a higher level version of that item. You can get items from places by sending a robot there.
- Mines (pickaxe) - provides ore -> gears -> robots
- Beach (shovel) - provides sand -> glass -> solar panels
- Research (plants) - provides Data, needed for uncovering more of the island.
You can right click on a robot to wake it up, and then give it commands. You must put it back to sleep before you can merge it.
Controls
- left click - drag to merge
- right click - give robots instructions
- Arrows/WASD - move camera
- plus/minus - zoom camera
Music: Inner Journey - Audionautix
Protip! - merging 3 gets you one new item, but merging 5 gets you two!
I'm stuck, how do I play? * Your first priority should be building a robot. 3 ingots -> 3 gears -> 1 robot. * After that, wake up the robot by right clicking on it * Researching the plants to gain data is useful, that can reveal more of the map * Revealing the map will make it easier to get more robots * Honestly just doing nothing but getting level 3 data (SD cards) and revealing the map will give you so much free stuff
So as ever, the scope was too big, I didn't get the central mechanics working until the final hours, and had to cut most the content. Probably should've known better on a solo jam!
Ratings
| Overall | 143th | 3.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 137th | 3.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 301th | 3.568⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 612th | 3.318⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 481th | 3.652⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 374th | 2.881⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 527th | 3.457⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
I'm curious what the extra planned content would be? It felt like there could be lots of more challenging unfolding-game like features added on top of this! Escalating costs but upgrades to mitigate that.
Also I really wish I'd had time to make the other three robot models, one of them looked like EVA from Wall-E and that would've been fun to animate.
The game didn't feel really difficult, and even having a limited amount of tiles didn't restrict me that much. (I can't even recall what happens if there is not enough room for new resources. Bots simply stop working?...) Maybe some kind of an 'enemy' could have helped with increasing the difficulty. The UX is great, merging felt satisfying, my only complaint is that sometimes the bot UI overlapped with the tile I wanted it to move towards, so I couldn't click on it.
Also, it took me an embarassing amount of time to understand what I should do to even begin playing :D I assumed I had to drag the tiles on top of each other to merge them, not move them next to each other. But after I got it, I didn't encounter any other difficulties, so even a little tutorial on how to merge things would go a long way.
Overall, I had a good time with this game. Great job!
The robot control UI was a little confusing at first, but it only took a few clicks to figure out. The game looks pretty, I do love the cute little robot! And while music wasn't done for the game, it was a pretty good choice - it fits the feel of the game nicely.
One thing that I was wondering about was if the resources wouldn't be better if they were made infinite. Right now, they are functionally infinite as far as getting to the victory screen goes, so the resource fields depleting doesn't really feel like it's that important. And it's especially well visible with the research / data - after finishing the game I spent some time to deplete all the fields and I ended up with a ton of SD cards with nothing to spend them on. Which reminded me that a couple of times during the game I wished for some sort of trash can to get rid of resources I didn't want to free some space. :D

And, despite the warning that there's nothing else after that, I couldn't help myself. 😁

Overall, that's a pretty good jam entry! I had a lot of fun playing it!
Edit
Hmm, looks like images don't work for some reason. I'll see if reuploading them later is going to fix it, as right now it doesn't seem to do anything.