Island Nation

Thanks for playing and your kind words!

Yes - I had tried to come up with a system of randomly generating lists of ports and then a logical way of very roughly appraising the list based on an algorithmically-generated hypothetical route which would then determine the price. If you could come up with a route that was more efficient than the algorithm, then you would generate money faster and thus recoup your initial investment faster. If I had more time, I'd make the algorithm harder to outsmart and make it possible to actually lose money and just make the game be an actual challenge!

Thanks for noticing the islands :) The reason for the blurriness was because when I created the background image initially, all the islands were much smaller, but toward the end when a lot of the mechanics were starting to work and I could test it properly, I realised there was not much challenge in plotting routes that weaved in and out of the islands. By increasing the size of certain islands I made the map more maze-like and the routes you had to create more intricate, at the cost of some annoying fuzzy sprites that I hastily sized up to achieve this.

There isn't downloadable window/mac versions because I'm running GMS2 on a Mac and famously it's very hard to generate a functional Mac executable that runs on the latest version of OSX. I would normally copy all my project files onto a separate hard disk, boot my computer in Windows and debug and compile for Windows - but I ran out of time and so I decided to just upload the HTML5 version for the deadline which in theory everyone should be able to run okay.

Thanks for playing and taking the time to review!

Thanks for pointing that out - the HTML version I uploaded to the gm48 site is the jam version and this can't be altered after the hand-in time. This is the one when you click on the 'Play' button by the 'Download' button. This is the game I expect people played and judged based on all the feedback I've received.

The itch.io version was initially the jam version of the game, but shortly after the hand-in I fixed a game-breaking bug so people could play a more stable version of the game after they've judged it if they wished. To make that clearer, I've updated the description text for my game.

I agree if someone didn't upload a version to the gm48 site and only had an itch.io link to a game that they repeatedly updated after the hand-in time that would probably deserve to be disqualified.

Thanks for playing! And thank you for taking the time to feedback.

Thanks for playing and your frank feedback!

Oof.

I think have to disagree with you on your point that ability to create waypoints between ports makes the game more trivial. I'd agree if I was trying to make a puzzle game where the challenge was to find the shortest path between two points across a fields of nodes some of which weren't allowed to connect - If you're judging my game against that then yes, creating routes is trivial.

The depth and challenge I was trying to create comes not from merely placing the route, but making a decision about which route would be the best deal (in that randomised list there will always be some bargains that have great ROI, and others will take ages to recover their initial investment), and also in figuring out the most efficient path between the ports to eek out as much profit as possible - of course balancing this was really tricky in the timescale, and I didn't want it to be too punishing and make players lose money on routes and bankrupt themselves - I wanted it more to be like a farming simulator where your skill in the game determines how quickly you lock into that exponential growth.

I know many people playing this and reviewing it didn't check out my tutorial and because of that this game is really opaque to them, that's definitely on me, I needed to have left more time to put some in-game instruction in.

Thank you for playing taking the time to review!

Edit: Wow - just read your edit, thanks for coming back for clarification! - I understand what you're referring to when you described that aspect as trivial, and I do agree - A toy/sandbox is exactly what I was going for and I totally agree it needs a LOT of balancing and more ways of mechanically encouraging optimisation to establish and maintain players' engagement with it.

Just off the top of my head for a start, the deals need to vary in price a lot more, because the dominant strategy is just to buy the most expensive deal you can afford and no matter how much you would optimise a cheaper route, there's no way you could even close to the value of a less optimised + more expensive deal.

I apologise for the tone of my response, I feel quite proud of what I've achieved in the jam and defensive of my approach to making games that don't necessarily have a fail state or have conflict as the mechanism for engagement - I really enjoy playing games like Anno 1404 and just delivering packages in Death Stranding and just doing the taxi driving side missions is GTA games 😅I want to create experiences like that which a lot of people do dismiss as trivial (and they're kinda not wrong but I think they're missing the point).

Thank you Fachewachewa 😊🙏

Thanks for playing - apologies the tutorial was not in-game and that you missed the link to the video in my description and had to muddle through - thank you for sticking with it and I'm really glad you were enjoying building up the trade routes and making delicious lines everywhere - I really wanted to give the player a sense that they were building up and tinkering with a sweet train set, adding new tracks and rerouting others so they were more efficient. I'm sorry about the crash and losing your progress! This was the tightest to the deadline I've ever been at a game jam and I didn't have time to play the game all the way through since the last pieces of the mechanics were in - that buy button was working before but I must have done something that bust it :[ Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for playing and your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it, I wanted to create a gentle relaxing game and I'm pleased it resonated with you in that way :)

Totally agree RE: tutorial - I was right up the wire with this one, the UI was really time-consuming to finish and debug and I had an hour to go so I decided to record a quick tutorial video and display the link to that prominently on my description page (also the controls) in the hope that people might check that out before they play so they're not immediately stuck and frustrated. Maybe just a help button in the bottom corner that displayed a jpg with some help text and the controls would have been better. There was quite a lot of nuance in creating the trade routes and what made a good trade route that I felt would be easier to communicate with a video. ...I dunno! Thanks for letting me know though, should be an easy fix with a post-jam patch.

Thank you for playing :)