Islands Recharted!
play _with_ the map
Press 'H' for help during gameplay!
Still stuck? .0.
(Or just curious if I got round to implementing those extra bits within the last 40 minutes? Yes.)
Read on!
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Your mission is to get as many ships to the wooden piers in the top-right corner.
As many as possible, before time runs out! Each ship scores one point. Simple, eh?
Ships of course float with the currents .1., which are marked on your map as blue arrows.
Of course you're not out at sea without a paddle .2., just change the map to suit your needs!
Simply mouse your 2x2-tile orange-flavoured cursor anywhere on the map to either locally (click left and):
- swap sea and land tiles
- reverse the currents
- rotate the set of tiles clockwise .3.
- .. or counterclockwise .3.
You can scroll through the possible actions with the mousewheel, right mouse-button or arrow keys.
There is quick access with number-keys '1' through '4' as well, for those that don't like loops.
Whatever you do, don't press '5'! (Well ok, fine, because it's you, go ahead.)
If only it where so simple though … There is another entity that enjoys as little CHAOS. And also the color purple. Don't we all .4.!
In addition to the other actions, the Jellym… err, 'CHAOS', can also:
- completely randomize an area
- spawn new ships .5.
Despite being an entity of chaos however, there are nonetheless certain predictable patterns…
each time the violet bar at the bottom empties out, the action in the lower-left is performed on wherever the mauve cursor is located .6.
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Besides the game itself, there are a scant few quality of live things that I managed to get into the game as well:
- Press 'T' to view the map from (mostly) the top, instead of in perspective.
- Press 'Z' to restart fresh anytime.
- Press 'P' to pause the game.
- Pesss 'M' to (un)mute the music (not the other sounds … sorry).
Finally, tourist mode! Press '5' to take the view .7. from a ship.
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footnotes:
0) Possibly because the help screens where written in a hurry, before a deadline?
1) What's this 'wind' thing people keep talking about?
2) Well, you are, but you're not completely helpless in any case.
3) Note that the tiles themselve_ are not rotated! Hey I can do serious footnotes as well :-)
4) … maybe I should have let the player have the purple color instead. Ah well, live and learn.
5) Chaos isn't nescesarily evil … you also depend on it for the highscore!
6) Now that's purple prose! … get it? Because I … wait come back!
7) Chances are the ships view is directed outside of the map though, so sometimes this is very boring … especially since I forgot to enlarge the sea and bottom, so the horizon is very close.
Comments (15)
@yuang Thanks for the in-depth review!
The low res look is because I made this with my own hacky ray-trace 'engine' (higher res would … do things to the framerate). I somehow keep picking different ways to not show off what the engine is capable of during game-jams though.
'Tourist mode' was a last minute addition… like almost literally last minute :-) The initial idea was that you could steer a single ship in that mode.
You're right that the reset functionality is the most shoddy part of the framework right now. I don't really work in scenes and scripts though, it's all just very hacky javascript (and a lot of slightly less hacky shader code), so I'm just glad any bugs are minor inconveniences rather than actual annoyances or show-stoppers. (On the plus side, the entire zip of the game, including art & music assets, etc., is less than a megabyte.)
I like this concept! Mainly, the fact that you can't really "lose", so the time limit doesn't feel all that stressful. The chaomancer adds just enough randomness to keep it interesting, but you also have plenty of control over what happens.
The top right corner feels a bit arbitrary. An exit in the middle of the top or bottom edge would feel more natural to me.
The main thing I would change is the UI. You have 4 actions that are all triggered in the same way, but do very different things, and what will happen is conveyed some small text in the corner. A good improvement would be to change your cursor, for example: 4 big arrows for rotate, inverted wind arrows for reverse, and some icon for swap. Even better would be if these actions were all triggered by different gestures, such as: left click for reverse, right click for swap, and mouse wheel up/down for rotate.
@TheGrumpyGameDev Yes, that's sort of what I have to go for, given my self imposed limitations :-)
@thomastc
Thanks! :-)
I really like your idea of the 'cursor becomes the icon'. It's one of those 'I totally should have done that' moments when I read your comment. I did try to make some icons, but I thought they might end up too large & overlapping the actual action … but I could just've incorporated them into the cursor itself.
(Oh, and top right is mostly so I could make this all work on a small map. That was before the starting point became slightly more arbitrary though!)
The concept is good, but I would have sticked to a more simple gameplay, for example only allowing the left rotation.
A bit too complex for me, at final.
(I would have prefered simple clear 2D than this 3D, I has difficulties to readthe situation (ok, I'm getting old…))
Despite my feedbacks, I find the idea nice, and we can see you made a lot of work for the realization. I sure would enjoy playing a simpler version.
The map actions was a good combination of traditional "tile manipulation" moves, although, as thomastc mentioned, the UI for changing between the tools (and a clear visual indicator of which tool was currently selected) would be a good point to enhance for future versions.
The music and sounds fit the game nicely, and added an extra bit of atmosphere.
Is there a way to show the game in a dedicated window on itch.io? It was hard to see the game field in such a small window, and using the mouse-wheel to scroll through the tools also scrolled the page.
All in all, this was an interesting puzzle game!
@Somnium Thanks! (Seems like we where reviewing each others' games in near parallel.)
Yes, the UI was definitely something I struggled with. In the end I decided to ditch (the rest of) the 2D UI I planned because I thought it wouldn't work & the rest of the game needed finishing.
Glad you mentioned the music and sounds, it's something I'm most pleased with this time around, and no one had mentioned it yet, so I was a bit worried there.
I'm sorry to say that there isn't any way to change the games resolution, scale or windowed-ness. I mostly build the framework myself from raw javascript and shader-code (plus beepbox-synth code), and the capabilities are very rudimentary. You can press 'T' to get a top down view though, that might help a little.
The particular audio-visual style continues on its merry way. There's something special about pixelated 3D graphics with reflective materials everywhere that I quite fancy.
Not much I can say about the interactivity this time. Everyone else got their words in edgewise prior. There could be additional chaotic elements throw in the mix, such as pirate ships which try to give any civilians the full broadside treatment. Coming up with new features is always easy, though.
Strangely enough, trying to run this in Linux on both Firefox and Chromium none of the 3D models show up. It is just the background, arrows and sound effects over there.
@HuvaaKoodia Thanks for the feedback! I do seem to be getting the hang of making something apealing with this reflective very-low-poly 3D look … though I'm not quite where I want to be yet.
Everyone else got their words in edgewise prior.
I got the same when I tried to review your entry actually. Worse, I think they said it better than I could've, so I decided to stay quiet.
Strangely enough, trying to run this in Linux on both Firefox and Chromium none of the 3D models show up.
That is strange, since I developed this on Linux/Firefox (and only tested afterwards on a quite old Win/Chromium setup). I don't want to impose on your time, but, if you can spare some, I'd like to know what the web-console says. (Ctrl-Shift-K in Firefox. Ctrl-Shift-i, then the 'console'-tab in Chrome.)
I tried the web build on a different, newer, Linux machine and it worked. On the older one this is the standout error message:
Source map error: Error: request failed with status 403
Resource URL: https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2737002/islands_recharted/planck.min.js
Source Map URL: planck.min.js.mapThe GET request did pass:
GET https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2737002/islands_recharted/planck.min.js
Status200 OK@HuvaaKoodia Thanks for getting back to me!
Those source-maps are a debugging aid included from one of the dependencies (the box2d port in this case) and is not supposed to interfere with the game if the 'unminified' source isn't present. I got similar errors on older machines, but not the 403 I think?
In any case, if it's messing things up I should look into disabling those source-maps.
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| # | User | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @yuang | 21 ships | |
| 2 | @thomastc | 16 ships | |
| 3 | @katuiche | 12 ships | View all 3 scores |
10 minutes of play in, 3 playthroughs, final score 21. Here's my feedback:
Compared to the other games I've seen so far, this one is more complex; puzzle's pretty good. It adheres really well with the Maps and Ships theme, Chaos I don't see so much (I think it actually sticks closer to the "order" theme that didn't quite make it). Overall a very solid entry. Didn't quite get why you went for the low-res look. The "tourist mode" camera looks cool, it's a shame the game's not actually playable like that.
Got stuck without any ships in one playthrough, had to reload for the third playthrough because the game didn't reset properly. Perhaps it would help if you just reloaded the scene instead of resetting the board through script? I can only find minor bugs and nitpicks; I've got very little to complain about. Good show, well done.