Misty Isles
Discover where the islands are hidden in the fog!
Misty Isles is a puzzle game inspired by Minesweeper and nonograms (Picross). You are looking at an ocean obscured by mist, with only a handful of clues poking through. Your task is to find out where is land and where is water, so your ship can sail through safely.
This is my first game built with the Godot engine. I'll write more about that later, but suffice it to say that despite some rough edges, Godot 3.0 seems really solid and well designed overall. Graphics were done in Inkscape.
There are 15 levels. Unfortunately, that left me no time to add any audio.
The game has been tested in Firefox and Chromium.
Post-jam update: the canvas now adapts to your window size, no more scrolling on small screens.
Comments (17)
@Raindrinker Thank you for the kind words! I do intend to polish and release on mobile – in fact, I've been sitting on this concept for a while, and when this theme came up, I took the opportunity to implement it. I'm surprised you like the difficulty curve, because very little (read: no) playtesting went into that :) As to the artwork, I originally envisioned low-poly 3D done in Blender (pre-rendered with super smooth lighting and such), but I figured my Blender was too rusty so I took the easy (for me) way of Inkscape instead.
@CaiqueAssis Sorry about the resolution thing! It's my first Godot game, and I hadn't done the tutorial on making things scalable yet. Doing that one today ;)
@thomastc no problem! For the first time using the engine, and making this in only 48h, was really impressive :D
Extremely awesome!!!!!!! It kept me engaged and played it till the end. I had some personal trouble understanding the mechanics but its super fun once you get it, and I love that even though the player knows how the puzzle works, it never gets super easy. I would love to see the polished version of it!
Awesome work!!!
@CaiqueAssis @RodMolina Could you explain a bit more where/why you got stuck, what you were confused about? Want to make sure not to make the same mistakes in the future :)
Finished the game, and enjoyed it throughout. For some reason my favorite part of the game was how the boat carefully avoids the whales, so cute!
The whole sea navigation theme was perfect for conveying the game rules, with each element fitting its specifics in a nice way (seagulls = 3 = lots of land, lighthouse = 1 = little land, etc.) and a story that adds another layer of cohesion between the theme & levels. The difficulty balancing turned out right as well!
Everything just fits together, awesome entry. +1 for turning this into a mobile app.
Looking forward to your detailed feedback on Godot, a first plus is that the embed seems much lighter than Unity's?
@Wan Thanks for your feedback! The whale avoidance thing (like so many things) was a spur of the moment, triggered by how Godot made it a breeze to define paths to be followed, and I couldn't envision a boat just sailing over the top of a whale. So then I made it deliberately head straight towards it and only turn at the last moment. Never thought somebody would notice!
I just published my Godot ramblings here.
@thomastc I couldn't understand the rules completly at the beginning because I didn't pay enough attention and thought the game worked like minesweeper, that means that I thought that the neighbors tiles where all the squares around them, but then I noticed that the instructions said "4 neighbors" making it clear for me that were the four boxes that directly touched the initial tile.
So, I guess its not a game problem, its a problem of my mind hahaha yet maybe the game can show the player which are the neighbor tiles at the first level, just so they know which they are. But again I guess its to much, and might prevent the players of having the satisfaction of figuring how the game works, just like the one I had when I finally got it haha
I love the graphic style! The puzzle tiles are beautiful.
I would maybe try to make the big sea surfaces a little bit more varied.
Also somehow there's something slighly off about the boat, maybe the fact that it has those crossed lines breaking the general triangular graphics.
I would also do without the big scroll at the bottom, but that's probably just a matter of personal taste :)
I would include a bit more instructions in the beginning. I was confused at first because I didn't know what the goal was exactly and how the game would signal success/failure. One issue was the fact that at first I did not see the text about the islands, since one needed to scroll down to see it. Another thing that confused me at first was the role of the little tick boxes.
As pointed above, the connection between what the tile represents and the amount of land/water around it feels very natural, which is really nice. Also really cool is how smooth and in-game feels the transition between levels. And the end screen with the little boat parking next to the others is really pretty and satisfying.
By far my favorite entry I've played so far. I'm a big fan of minesweeper and pictocross, and sure enough, this game scratches that itch just right with a fresh set of rules I haven't see before. It's good on the eyes, it fits the theme perfectly, the dialogue and art is super charming, and I love that the rules for each piece actually make sense (seagulls fly near the coast, lighthouses are stereotypically built on capes, etc.). My only minor gripe is that I wish the game told me I could click twice on a tile to mark it as water - it took me a few levels to figure that out by accident. If you make a post-jam version with more levels, I'll be on that in a heartbeat.
Hey!
So, I endend up replaying the game. I actually got the idea this time, but after lots of trial and error…basically, I wasn't understanding that little green check mark on some of the tiles, that changed when I put some islands or not around them.
It wasn't until I got to level 9 that I saw there was something being drawn when I hovered them with the mouse - some hints explaining what each one were giving hints of. That completely passed by me because the resolution doesn't fit on my screen, so I had to keep scrolling down…
Still, even after getting to level 9, I'm not completely sure I understand everything that I'm doing - I get the concept, but sometimes it's seems that when I think it's a certain solution and I'm clicking to rearrange some islands, I suddenly win by accident.
And it got me lots of time to understand that a castle or lighthouse already represents one piece of land.
I think those were my main issues.
Nice work, I'm not too much a fan of puzzle games, so difficult for me to get too excited about it, but its really nicely done. I was initially confused with the information about 1 in 4 neighbours, because I just assumed neighbours to include diagonals so 8, and also because it was saying 1 in 4 for tiles that were on the edge and so didn't actally have 4 non diagonal neighbours either. Also I inittially assumed that when i chose a tile I was revealing what was actually there rather than choosing what i wanted to be there, so i was confused for a second when I could click the tile again and it changed. It only took a minute or 2 to understand what was actually going on. Also on the smaller boards it seems if you are stuck it would be often easy to just randomly hit tiles until you get it. Also I wasn't initially sure if when it says 1 tile must be land it meant at least 1 or exactly 1.. obviously doesn't take too long to figure out, but phrased differently it could be more clear.
Also thanks for your post on godot, I've also been meaning to give it a proper try so that was encouraging.
Keep up the good work
Nice puzzle! Never seen this combination of genres before, but then again I'm not puzzle savvy.
Initially failed to realize that the lighthouse tile counts towards the island size. Slightly confused before figuring it out. More my bad than anything.
Just the right amount of levels, didn't get bored. The few lines of dialog are a cost effective solution for adding a touch of character.
The subject matter fits the theme, but when actually playing visibility did not cross my mind once. Some way to actually tie the interactivity to the theme would have been interesting.
The graphics are great, if only there was some audio to go with it. There's a positive to going unranked (you can use any free assets you want!)
Great work!
Overall: 8 (Great)
Graphics: 8 (Great)
Gameplay: 8 (Great)
Originality: 8 (Great)
Theme: 6 (Above average)
This is exactly the kind of game I love and it was executed really, really well. The art and animation is charming, and you even managed to get some writing in there (which in my experience, is tough in a game jam).
This is one of my favourites so far and I look forward to seeing it expanded on in future.
One of the best games I played so far. It just does what it wants to do SO well. The art is extremely cohesive, the puzzles interesting, and the difficuly curve perfect.
Polish a bit and make it into an android game. You'll make moneys.
Great work! :D