I like the concept of this game! One thing - it seems you can spend all of your wood by building other cards that don't provide wood, then when you get a card that provides wood - it costs wood to build! Maybe a small improvement would be making the card that provides wood cost no wood?

Was a very interesting game, the core gameplay mechanic of discarding / buying a card is very addictive somehow. Weighing the benefits of building a fishing building that will be swallowed by water requires quick calculation, but you don't have enough time to calculate. Great!

I loved this game, the hand was addictive my only issue was the late game since once I hit the point I could keep the water frozen forever I quickly filled up all the tiles and only option I had left was to keep making the island taller, super well done art, music and theme all matched well maybe the only thing would be a slower hand time but more cards at once since a single card soon becomes too quick to chose what to do with it not sure but 10/10 in my books well done

Absolutely lovely game, and it seems you're making your own engine too! Congrats on that.

It reminds me of two things... one is Dorfromantik, the other is my own game from earlier LD, Floodtown!

The mechanic is fun, although I'm not sure if it's just me or is it pretty hard to bootstrap the economy?

 Cool game, but it's a little bit to easy you mostly need to buy temple and stone quarry, so after some time water cant even move couse it's stunned all the time xD
Love that kind of games, easy and peacefull :D 5/5

@sita true, early game is kind of slow, but you can skyrocket if you find a good spot and place many buildings close together!

Simple and good-looking screen, the game is enough to play! It's about resource management for a limited time, but sometimes the lack of some resources holds me back, maybe because a single card slot is too few?

Really like the premise. Wish there was a little bit more of a introduction. But once you get the hang of it, it makes sense. Would be interesting if you got to keep up to three cards to play with slower generation of new cards. Temples feel a little bit too powerful in the time you can stun the water for. I enjoy this game though and fit nicely in the casual / hyper casual genre.

What a great entry and an "off the beaten path" idea :smile: big congratz :thumbsup_tone1:
This is actually a favorite... Especially for it's potential .. I felt locked down quite a bit where I was waiting to be able to Do something.. More variety to the cards? maybe two cards at once ...
But again great idea :thumbsup_tone1:

Damn this is awesome, easily the most playtime I've had so far couldn't stop until I "finished" it.
- The progression felt great, took me a few goes to properly manage resources and was super satisfying once I worked it out.
- Great low poly art
- Minimalist sound design that doesn't get in the way but still adds to the experience

Great work :)

Fun to play, it took me a little time to know that I can discard card at hand. Very pretty game

The linux version seems to be broken
./atlantis: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.33' not found (required by ./atlantis)

@schadocalex Sorry for this problem, and thanks for reporting it! Glibc-2.33 was released about a year ago, probably updating your system might fix this. Guess it wasn't wise on my side to stick to a recent version of glibc, I'll update my packaging environment. If you have Wine, you can also try the Windows version :)


Fun game. How is that even possible that the build has only 2.5 MB. Good job

@snowycocoon Thanks! I'm using my own tiny C++ engine with almost no dependencies except for a few tiny essential libs, thus the small size.

Simple yet fun entry. As others have stated, it is possible to freeze the water entirely if you have enough prayers/stone.
But still, I had a great time, congrats!

The game is VERY addicting, I like the idea. Adding a simple music would even make it more adorable :)
And from technical side 2,5 MB is absolutely crazy in compare with unity giants!
Also, I think that difficulty should increase, because from certain point it's becomes just fun to click the right card :)


That was pretty cool, I didnt realize you could zoom in til 10 minutes in lol, I like the look of the island, the water would have been nice to have some effects on it but time constraints, gameplay was nice just needs some balancing. Overall good job on the game.

Had a ton of fun playing this game. The mechanic fits the theme extremely well and everything was executed nicely. The only flaw is the balance of the end game. I was able to build a perpetual island by stacking enough resources to the point where I could pass on everything except for hill and frozen water cards. This meant I was basically able to keep the water frozen at all times and keep growing my island. To fix this, maybe you could cap the resources at a certain point. That way you need a diverse economy. If you bank up enough in the late game, you could just keep 1 or a few tiles and hill them forever.

I played this game longer than any other submission, and it is my favorite of the jam so far. Really well done.

Here is a nice picture of my "perpetual" island:


And here is a super tall mountain, that is still going without any input from me as I write out this comment :smile:


@zackavelli I'm still extremely surprised people get that far into the game! Really glad you liked it :) You are absolutely right that balance is the main issue here, but as usual I just didn't have enough time to balance it properly.

I needed to restart the game many times because I was always out of one recources. But after that it's realy fun to play and adictive.

Too bad it lacks a relaxing background music otherwise it's perfect :wink:

@fifut Yeah, you can get trapped in low wood/food situation and there's basically no way of recovering, that's a balancing oversight on my side. Thanks for your feedback!

I need one attempt to understand rules but then gameplay is fun. I really like the this game idea and 3d style. Player camera could be movable.

Cool game. Had fun playing it. Could freeze the water indefinately, so it was easy after a while. I like that the map is different every time (i sense some perlin noise maybe?). Adds a nice challenge.
I am working on a hex based game in my free time. It is not easy creating and rendering them in the correct positions XD.
A cool end game mechanic could be "recovering" sunken land for a huge price in stone or prayers, so it is worth it to play longer.
All in all a really good Game. I can see it an my phone someday with an endless mode ;)

Really nicely done game. I liked the gameplay concept. The design was nice, the aesthetics and sounds worked together well. The sound of water pouring into a cup got a chuckle out of me.

The balance needs tweaking. Early game it's easy to lose from lack of resources, then by the end you have thousands of everything and can't ever lose. But it's a jam game so balance issues are understandable.

Very fun) good balance, but in the end it I was just sitting with infinite resources and rolling for freeze and land elevation) still was entertaining to get to this point!

I really Enjoyed This! very impressive for a compo game! managed to keep it up for 49 minutes haha! Great work!

:) Really fun game! Definitely needs some balance tweaks. It took me a couple play-throughs before I learned that you pretty much have to build things in a pretty set sequence at the start. And don't run out of wood!!

Beautiful art. Great GUIs. Excellent mechanic. Fun game! Just needs some music!

Definitely the best submission I've played so far.

Pretty enjoyable! After some time you're getting easily maxed out, so there's not much to do, so definitely some kind of balancing would be nice. Additionally, better camera control would be appreciated - you can only rotate around the middle of the island and it's hard to see anything on its shore sometimes. Nonetheless, I had a bunch of fun and the game looks decent. Nice work!

Anyway since everyone's posting their islands, here's mine:

I have been enjoyed this game alot. IReally appreciate the system-driven gameplay.

A neat, simple little sim. Losing sure didn't feel inevitable, though! After some struggling at the beginning, I was able to go infinite on my first run. With a way to increase the draw speed or even to unlock new cards, I could see this being a cool incremental game.

The great "Island of Erectus" defies the inevitable


What a great idea and very well executed. I had fun playing this.

Cool game, I agree with what the others have sad. It fun to play, thou I made some mistakes at the beginning by building too close to the edge. It was fun, could use some background music, but there is plenty of content for a compo already :)

Very fun, took me a moment to figure out the mechanics, but after that felt quite addictive

Super fun! I managed to build a stable island and it was neat to figure out how to make that happen. Good mechanics, I think you could make even more varied cards/buildings/special effects with more time.

Nice mechanics! And cool idea. Good and casual and still fast gameplay. Very nice job

Very cool. I had a lot of fun with this

Only nitpick: once you get a few sources of each resource going, it's a bit easy to run with it forever. Which is fun! Though it felt against the spirit of the game (and the theme)

Bravo, this is one of the most fun entries I have played so far! Very cool idea, and well executed! There is room for quite some different strategies, and it is kinda addiction to try and get ridiculous stuff like people shared above already haha.

I guess the only point of feedback is that the temples are a bit overpowered, maybe if the prayer cards were a bit less often drawn, the player wouldn't be able to rely just on prayers and actually be needing to build hills.

Great job!

This game have the best graphics among compos I played.

The gameplay concept is nice too, although there are balancing issues (at some point I had infinite resources and was able to chain freeze the water).

Looks amazing. Fun gameplay too. Took me a few runs to figure out which resources to go for, but went endless a few rounds after that :) Very impressive work for two days. A very strong entry that I will give high ratings.

Some feedback:
- I'd like to have the cards closer to the resources so I can compare the costs w/ how much I have without moving my eyes as much.
- Maybe add a background behind the text (or border) for more accessible reading against variable backgrounds.
- 3s was a little fast per card for me, especially when I was just getting started.

This was awesome! Your cover image caught my eye, very appealing graphics with the civ-style hexagons.

Gameplay was really innovative, I enjoyed the random card mechanics along with the freezing for discarding.

Being able to zoom in and rotate the camera was a great touch. I did really want to be able to pan the camera at times too, so unless i missed how to do that, that would be a nice addition.

Also, I did feel like there was some communication problems in terms of when you can/can't buy a card - I was thinking red text = not enough, but in reality it was just red text = negative resources for a particular card. Maybe having the card be grayed out when you can't buy it would be helpful!

Overall this was a really awesome game. Great job!

1mb! Best programming surely (:

Hexagons are the bestagons!

Really liked the hexagonal landscape you used haha. I was a bit confused at first but after a few playthroughs, I got the hang of it. I was also surprised how small the file was O_o - other games took me awhile to download so that was nice!

I got an error with the Linux build

```
./atlantis: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.33' not found (required by ./atlantis)
```

but fortunately the Windows build worked for me with Wine. Probably a local issue, but wanted you to be aware since it's your own code.

EDIT: Upon further review, I've seen you're already aware of the issue. Hard to read every comment :)

Balance issues and gameplay quibbles have been addressed elsewhere, so I'd just like to add that I'm really inspired by your technical craftsmanship and am glad I have this game as a resource, both as a gamer and a game developer.

@googlypoo Thanks for your kind feedback and suggestions! Not moving eyes too much is a good thing to think about, I haven't really considered that at all, thanks. There's a shadow behind all text, but I agree that black shadow on a dark background won't make much of a difference. Fast card draw is a result of bad last-minute balancing: I figured that the late game is pretty much waiting for good cards and discarding all others, so I made the cards appear faster. Balancing in 48 hours is...hard :)

@william-corrin Thanks for your input! Panning camera target was a thing I considered but decided to drop in favor of more important stuff. Now that I think about it, simply right-clicking on a tile to focus on it would probably be enough, and is easy to implement. Red text actually signifies the food resource: each resource has it's own icon and text color, I hoped it will make things easier to understand visually. Lesson learned :)

@bucketh3ad Thanks for your kind words! Yeah, the glibc version issue seems to be a common one, I'll definitely have to do something about it.

Fun game! I really liked the art style. I didn't really see any difficulty curve though so it got kind of boring once I was able to inevitably delay the water.

Whatever you do... DON'T WASTE YOUR WOOD!!!!

haha. what a great lesson :b
seriously a good entry! controls we're also rather easy, although I would have liked you maybe pointing it out in your game description, but I tried and figured it out eventually :)

This was really fun! I like organizing games as I'm a huge controlfreak myself :)
If you continue working on this, maybe add a few tooltips, because I was lost at first, haha :)

It would also be fun if the game could go in different directions, like for examople if you set up a lot of fish huts at the beginning you would built a fisherman village and have to send boats to other islands for deliveries or something like that :D (and then like - achievements for every route!)

.. I'm getting ahead of myself :) Cool entry, well done!

This is sick! Cool mechanics, nice art style, good play on the theme! If you want the specific feedback on how you can improve, keep reading!

This is feedback on the current state of the game, I'm sure some of this you would have implemented if you had more time, but I thought it could be useful for your next jam.

**Feedback!**

---

🎨 Graphics 🎨
- The 3D models looked great! So does the island.
- The food icon doesn't follow the same style as the 3 other icons (3 other ones have an outline, food Icon doesn't)
- I would have liked a way to disable the little floating icons or lower their opacity or something. They took up too much of the screen in my opinion.
- The water sometimes flashed a brighter blue, I'm not sure if that meant anything or not. If it did, finding a way to better communicate that might be useful.

🎮 Gameplay 🎮
- On my first game, I got a few fishing huts, placed them. Then didn't have any wood for a wood village xD Finding a way to produce wood without needing wood would be useful.
- In the end game you basically have so many resources the water can't really do anything to you. I think this could be fixed with a difficulty curve, so over time, the amount of time before the water rises decreases.
- Adding another tradeoff than food would have made the game more fun in my opinion. I never really struggled with the food, I just placed a few farms and fishing huts and I was good. But having a tradeoff like lowering the level of tiles could be fun. So as you gather stone, that stone tile becomes lower and lower. -> having more strategy in the game could have made it a lot more fun.
- With all that said, it was still a lot of fun to play

---

Hope this helps!

@polarcube Thanks for your kind words and a thorough feedback! Floating icons become a bit distracting, true; I did reduce their life duration but guess it wasn't enough, should've made them transparent as well. Water becomes light-blue when it's frozen, I didn't have any time to work on water properly so I guessed at least changing it's color during the frozen effect would be better than nothing. Given more time I'd definitely add freezing/melting sounds and better water rendering. The balancing issues you mentioned are all valid and the solutions you outlined are really interesting!

Very well done game. It's funny to see all these islands prints here in comments XD
I really liked the game and here is my island:

Great work.

Liked the concept, good take on the theme. Well done !

Very neat little game, it's hard to stop once you've started, even once the waters are frozen in an eternal winter. You just want your creation to live forever.

Plus very polished for a compo game!

As other players have mentioned, the difficulty curve could do with some tweaking. But it's hard to find much else to critic.

Really enjoyed playing this game - super addicting! My only gripe is that it got way too easy in the mid to late game, I felt like I could survive forever - I was just waiting for freeze and hill cards, and my island was covered! Maybe scaling the cost of the prayer cards would help with that. Great entry and very impressive overall for compo. Well done.

I had a lot of fun with this. The idea of having the cards continuously cycle and at a fast enough pace that you don't have a lot of time to think gives a really fun franticness to a genre which is usually about playing slowly and carefully. Along with that, making discards tie into the overall timer to give you a benefit for removing cards you don't actually need ties the systems together in a really satisfying way.

Similar to a lot of others, I ended up finding how to last permanently. Though I kind of stumbled into it after running out of wood:

Ended up giving up after 40 minutes haha

I enjoyed that! Nice graphics, fun gameplay and excellent use of theme! I can really see this being further developed!

Wow pretty cool game! I didn't exactly understand the game at first but after I got the mechanics it was pretty engaging :smile: very strategic also! But after a while it's up to the RNG god to give us the cards to freeze the water :sweat_smile: Great game :smile:

What a beautiful game! Really good presentation and addicting gameplay. The balance of cards at the start is a little confusing, how you have to figure out the only good order that works to set the first few things up. But after that it flows very well. Ended up filling all the island :D

It's interesting how many different city builders there are this time... yours is the most frantic!

I had a lot of fun with this one! Even though your death isn't actually inevitable, it was still a really awesome and original take on the theme!

I played on stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1456354231?t=0h14m54s


Hey, great game, had my share of fun.

# Thoughts
## The good:
* Pure SDL game.
* I really liked, how when you want to restart the game, pressing `Esc` just brings up the controls for a short time.
* The game hits the theme spot-on, so well done there.
* Simple, but clean and expressive graphics. Rather easy to understand what is what.
* Well placed sounds.
* Challenging, but not impossible start when you know what you are doing.
* All the floating text + icons really nicely illustrates which buildings are active.
* Rather nice balance between several resources and their production.
* Additional placement graphics indicating valid locations for placing the building.

## The Bad:
* Once you get stable, the game becomes a chore - just looking for prayers.
* True random (if it's true) feels very unfair and punishing, especially at the start of the game. For example where you need that only one stone quarry, but you can never get the card on time.
* All the floating production indicators pollute the view when trying to build on the island, especially before you understand, you can scroll to zoom in.
* Accidentally discarded several cards, because I wanted to rotate my view by clicking secondary mouse button.

## The Ugly:
* Inversely challenging gameplay - very tough at the start of the game, and rather boring once you get stable.
* Easy to get soft-locked, because didn't notice that adding new building would make food production negative:
* And don't get the right building to make it positive again;
* Don't have enough resources to build the building to make it positive again;
* Food hits 0, crumbling any chance to recover;
* Don't have anything interesting to do, once you delay the inevitable.

# Suggestions
* Add total production indication near the total resource count. For example `Fishing hut` + `wood worker` would produce `+1 food` in total, making it very clear that we cannot afford another food consuming building right now.
* Add more possible card slots (maybe a building upgrade). That would allow keeping the desired building in queue, but still search for your next steps at the same time. Maybe don't allow stacking freeze time from cards to balance things out.
* Add more actions to do after you get stable?
* This could easily go into autoclicker direction;
* Or allow raising back submerged land;
* Terraform tiles from land to stone, if you raise it high enough;

Overall - love, would like to play more, when there is more gameplay in there.

Oh, and since we are sharing our stable villages, here is mine: