AB-ALONE by SonnyBone
AB-ALONE: A survival/adventure/puzzle game with a unique twist.
An alien creature crash lands on an unknown planet and ends up on a remote island. With no way to repair the spacecraft and no way to call for help, the stranded alien is forced to survive while attempting to find a way home. The small island is covered with sand, grass, rocks, and trees... but no other life forms can be found. A startling discovery reveals that there may be more to this world than originally thought...
CONTROLS
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The controls are listed in a text file as well as on my game page at: http://www.phantomgreen.com/games/abalone
wasd - movement
mouse - cursor
left click - select/use
scroll wheel - zoom
f4 - toggle full screen
esc - exit
GUIDE
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This game is meant to be a puzzle. There is no tutorial. You have to learn how to survive just like an alien on an unknown planet. I will write a guide that will spoil the experience, and I will include it on my game page at: http://www.phantomgreen.com/games/abalone
An alien creature crash lands on an unknown planet and ends up on a remote island. With no way to repair the spacecraft and no way to call for help, the stranded alien is forced to survive while attempting to find a way home. The small island is covered with sand, grass, rocks, and trees... but no other life forms can be found. A startling discovery reveals that there may be more to this world than originally thought...
CONTROLS
-----------
The controls are listed in a text file as well as on my game page at: http://www.phantomgreen.com/games/abalone
wasd - movement
mouse - cursor
left click - select/use
scroll wheel - zoom
f4 - toggle full screen
esc - exit
GUIDE
-----------
This game is meant to be a puzzle. There is no tutorial. You have to learn how to survive just like an alien on an unknown planet. I will write a guide that will spoil the experience, and I will include it on my game page at: http://www.phantomgreen.com/games/abalone
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall | 3.51 | 48 |
| Audio | 3.18 | 80 |
| Community | 3.86 | 14 |
| Fun | 3.21 | 64 |
| Graphics | 3.03 | 208 |
| Humor | 2.96 | 78 |
| Innovation | 3.08 | 135 |
| Mood | 3.05 | 132 |
| Theme | 3.62 | 65 |
Very nice! I loved the game overall. All the little decisions you made to make the game easier and harder, like how to recover energy without sleeping. How getting coconuts gets easier with time. Overall a great game! Thanks for inviting me to play this :-)
I have two suggestions for immediate improvement of the game:
1- A skip button for the opening sequence
2- When I select a tool, I can't select craft without selecting "select" before. So if I break a rock, and want to craft flint, for example, there is one extra click that is unnecessary (and I kept doing it wrong during the game)
Good job!
the game guide would have really helped in explaining a few things. like initially i thought the blue bar was time left in the day and each action took a chunk of the bar that represented the time it took to complete.
also this reminds me how much nicer a game feels with a title screen and a game over screen. the intro was perfect but being able to skip it would have been nice since i died a few times figuring out what to do.
Tooltips would have been a help... (I wasn't sure what the shell even was until after the game was over and I peeked in the guide).
I'd totally want to see what your "dang good" idea looks like after it gets dressed with some careful playtested polish, moody artwork, and some more of those design features that got cut out due to time. I redid mine like you suggested: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/43348544/N36.swf Your turn. ;)
I find it funny that I figured out how to finish the game while reading the guide, before I actually read the bit about how to finish the game. I had the game running in the background, then all of a sudden there was this sound I had never heard before.
Took me a couple more tries to actually beat the game though.
I don't think I would have figured it out normally. My first time playing I was always sleeping well before nightfall, not because I figured night was bad, but because I was always out of energy and that was the most obvious and fastest way to recover.
Once I knew what to do, it was a little tedious, having to stand around so long for things to happen and my energy to recover enough to chop down another tree.
Well-made, I can tell a lot of effort went into this. It was actually quite fun trying to figure out what to do and what was possible, there was a really neat sense of exploration.
I think forgoing tooltips or tutorials was the "right" choice, but when you do that you need to take extra care to make things more obvious to the player through clever visual/etc design. This takes some thought, but for example, you could have easily gave the coconuts a different shade, or outlined them to draw the player's attention to them. You don't have to overdo it, but you have to at least give the player a hint.
Had to look in the guide before I ever saw the blue thing, so that's something else that players won't get without being clued in somehow. I also didn't realize how the canopy worked, but that's not quite as big a deal.
One last thing, I would have personally liked to see a background music track that was more ominous to project a feeling of "alone on an island and you have no idea what to do". The one you have is more "okay let's set out and see what we can do!" which is also valid, but I personally would have preferred a different mood.
Couldn't work out what the question mark craft item was, couldn't finish it. Couldn't work out why a canopy or fire could help me...
Maybe some thought bubbles coming from the character could help? I certainly don't want things spelled out for me... but if he were to say "I'm feeling tired" when the red bar is low that might explain things and stay in character...
I had fun getting as far as I got!
The shitty thing was not having pause button. I pressed P and nothing... tried ESC and it quit the game! I had to start all over again.
But overall, a very solid puzzle game, and liked the ending too!