Floating Island by Echo Team
You may be able to guess which theme I was rooting for.
Welcome to our beautiful floating island!
We wish to buy your products. Please sell us your products. Build the factories to make them, the silos to store them, and the stores to sell them. But beware! Space is limited on our tiny island... how much money can you make?
Hints
- The factory smokestacks indicate if they are producing. If they are not, you may need a silo nearby, or more stores.
- Your cash flow indicates if stores are consuming. If they are not, you may be in trouble!
- Use the 1/2/3, Q/W/E, A/S/D, or Z/X/C keys to select the building to build, then build it with the left mouse button.
- There is no scripted end to the game, but eventually you'll stop making money. The resulting amount can be considered your score.
- Use the right mouse button to look around and the scroll wheel to zoom.
- You can restart the game with the button in the right lower corner of the screen, or press Alt-F4 to exit the game.
- Industrial machinery is quite heavy, so make sure to tread lightly... and we've all heard about the dangers of climate change!
Apologies for the minimalistic UI and lack of end screen. I had also wanted to include some cool flashy effects and audio, but alas, I spent too much time on the other stuff :P
Ratings
| Overall | 1075th | 2.891⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1189th | 2.467⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 915th | 2.859⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 670th | 3.402⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 393th | 3.723⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 877th | 1.868⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1069th | 2.342⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
Additionally, I was afraid that offering significantly more information would make it become too easy since the game play loop isn't very fancy. But it's a moot point, I just ran out of time.
I also tried to build a WebGL version but it looks terrible and doesn't work for some reason.
Unfortunately more feedback would be needed, a capacity indicator for silos and a income indicator of the stores would be appreciated. Maybe even a tutorial would be appropriate, to explain things like that factory production and store revenue is dependent on the respective distance to the next silo.
My LD games always suffer from things like that since I always end up implementing game play last. It looked a lot better in my head. Originally I wanted the UI to be more clear, and allow different pricing based on height and slope (to discourage starting on mountains). But putting stuff on the mouse cursor and fading them and stuff was just too much additional work. I'll learn eventually. It went better than my previous projects.
I also have to sheepishly admit that I am from a time when games lacked tutorials and have the fun was figuring them out XD So I might not be the best candidate for stuff like that.
@hare-software Water just kills your buildings and whatever resources they hold. The base plate then disappears (mostly because its transparency doesn't work with the water).
For the record, factories produce resources which go in (nearby!) silos from which (nearby!) stores withdraw resources to sell product, giving you money. Rate of production/consumption is reduced as the distance to the silo increases. Factories produce pollution which causes the water to rise, and each building adds to the weight of the island which causes the island to sink. That's about it.
If you are a Unity user then there is of course the option of checking out the source code from Github and playing the game in the editor (or making a build yourself).
The water rising the more you build is cool. When lots of the island was underwater, I liked panning my camera through it. Felt like exploring a sunken city :D
The randomized generation of the island is really cool, would you mind writing a bit about how you did that?
The gameplay itself was hard to understand. How close must factories be to silos? How close must stores be to silos? Is distance measured in three dimensions or two? Can factories feed directly into stores? How many factories can one store support? How many factories can one silo support? There's no way to find these answers without either rigorous experimentation or looking at the code :/ even a .txt file with these details, included in the download, would have helped a lot.
I really think you have the beginnings of a cool, addictive game, but I just need to know what's going on!
The generation is based on subdivision of a isosceles triangle (well, six of them forming a hexagon). This is known as the Fournier algorithm (a 3D version of Brownian motion), but I forewent on perturbing along the edge normal in favour of simply perturbing along the Y axis. The Voronoi Diagram of a regular triangle mesh is a regular hexagon mesh, so since the vertices were only ever adjusted along the Y axis I could simply place hexagons prefabs on the vertices and have them fit together. The subdivision process isn't really very visible anymore, I applied two filters for gameplay reasons (to make things flatter and more like an island), but the earlier larger version kinda looked like Minecraft, lol. There are some screenshots in the source repository.
This was an idea I had a couple of days before the jam that I wanted to try out, and I'm glad it worked and that you like it. It's also where most of my time went.
As for your other questions... The ranges are in 3D (I originally wanted 2D and a special height penalty or bonus depending on higher or lower) but they are in real units, not hexagon steps. All because it was simpler and faster to make. The actual ranges are 3 for factories and 4 for stores (one hexagon is 1 in diameter). Factories cannot feed directly into stores, having silos in between just seemed cooler (also I love how they turned out XD). The ratio of stores to factories is muddied on purpose, I set the rates to rather like 6.546456 and 10.36475 or something so there would not be exact gameplay. The idea being that the game would give you clues as to whether you don't have enough factories (slow cash, preferably some kind of indication that silos are empty) or stores (factory smokestacks stop working, preferable some kind of indications that silos are full XD).
A range indicator before placing a building would be interesting, but it's all a moot point for now. I think next time I'll try to spend less time on the level and more on the gameplay. And finally get to do some audio!
As others have said, definitely needs more feedback of what is going on, maybe click on an already established building type to see progress or something?
Nice concept!
\> This was an idea I had a couple of days before the jam
\> game is called "Floating Islands"
Something tells me you *really* wanted "Floating Islands" to win as the theme :)
Thanks for explaining the island generation algorithm. That's so cool!!
All in all a very pretty submission, would be cool to see it with a little more information. Reading your comments here about how stores, silos and factories interact was interesting, I think just a splash screen in the beginning with that sort of info would have been enough. There is lots of attention to detail in the models, the factory workers even have a door to enter their workplace. Water effects were good-looking too with the foam effect and the sunlight reflection. Could look at that water rise forever.
@captaindreamcast Thanks, it's what cost the most time XD
I really liked how smooth the camera panning felt and the water was nice.
This looks great, and feels like the very beginning of something that might make for a good game.
I mirrored the downloads to somewhere else and updated the links, so you can still download away!
The game becomes fairly dull after a few minutes - mainly because of the lack of music, a calm sea sound or some animal sounds - such as birds - would really liven up the game overall.
Finally, i think there should be a tutorial, seeing as it is not overly clear what the goal is initially. Or what each thing does.
http://www.ngamed.com/FloatingIsland-1.0.0-Source.zip
Next time I just won't put the releases in the GitHub repository.
Also, an exit button would have been nice instead of having to press Alt-F4 to exit and would have been easy and quick to add (except in WebGL, of course).
Pros :
- Beautiful graphics, and really readable game. I also loved the water effects.
- Clever and addictive scoring mechanic
- Controls are minimal, but totally functional
Cons :
- The UI is okay per se, but an improved UX (in-game tutorial, visual feedback, ...) would help a lot
- Some more audio would improve the mood a lot
All in all, great game !
Everyone else, thanks for the comments! I understand an exit button is simple to add, but a lot of things are simple to add. I just ran out of time. Next time I'm going to (try to) approach things differently.
A classic use of the theme, the sinking island is a powerful motivator. I'm sure you had many more ideas to implement... always the way of LD. Still, what's here seems to work and forms a loop of gameplay, even if aspects of it still need fleshing out.