Another jam, another fun, another game!

1sland is a game about surviving on an island with only one tool, randomly selected.

I tried to make it a crazy, time-pressed and fast-paced set of mini games. Kind of in the style of anything made by sos, but that didn’t quite work out :] Although everything functions properly, all the pieces work and are put together, the game in it entirety just doesn’t feel right, it’s not intuitive at all! Here’s why.

What went wrong:

– No feedback! The biggest mistake ever is to make a game that doesn’t provide the player with loud enough feedback to his actions. And by loud I not only mean understandable sound effects but also visual cues – like feather particles when you hit a bird, or sparks when you try to start a fire. Camera shakes when the player is hit – or at least making the sprite blink a bit. Even the physics can work wonders to player feedback, when the weapon really feels light or heavy by subtle differences in how it follows the cursor. Bold tutorial texts are ok too, but should only be a last resort when all else fails.
– Little time does not make fast pace. Limiting the players time to perform a task doesn’t automatically make the pace of the game fast. Quite contrary, it just makes the game hard to follow, loosing the player in a maze of doubt. A energetic soundtrack, fluid animations, visual effect – that’s how it should have been done

What went right:

Although at day 1 I knew this idea needs WAY more assets and graphics a talentless nerd like me can produce, surprisingly that wasn’t as hard as i thought. I just drew whatever i needed and then “pixelated” it into a piece of pixel “art”! Just look:

I was using Pixelmator (not pixel-art oriented at all, just a name for a photo editing app), but I’m sure you’ll find plenty other software that can do this. Also, Unity2d, although missing some features and hardly documented at all worked just great for me!

Oh one more problem I had – it’s really hard to concentrate when someone next to you is having fun making awesome animations. I mean, seriously check this guy out!

I mean come on, I can’t compete with that! Damn you spierek and you’re demoralising moves!

Still, this was fun. Hope my lesson here helps you. Meanwhile, I’m going back to mining DOGEcoins!