Island Takeover

I felt this game has interesting mechanics! I like the idea of managing your crew on your ship vs offloading them on islands to capture it. I also love how each has its own benefits, and I think it makes for a very fun formula for a game.

However I just felt that the movement of the ship was a little bit lacking in feeling natural. It felt too snappy for me.

The game also felt too easy because as fun as the mechanics are (more pirates on ship = more accuracy) I never actually was able to make use of them since It was very easy to kill the enemy with just 1 pirate on my ship and then the enemy never respawned, so I just spent my time running around claiming the islands.

Artstyle wise I always love spritestacking, so that was a plus for me. Fun game! just could use some balancing.

I appreciate the addition of a tutorial-- the biggest issue with a lot of these jam games is how unclear they are, and your does a good job of explaining its own mechanics.

Overall, I really like it! I think you have to make a lot of interesting tradeoffs-- do you want the pirates on your ship to increase accuracy, or do you want to use them to take over islands and subsequently get more pirates? It also gave it a distinct feeling of having 'territory' you own, where it is easy to restock on men and supplies.

However, while I like the mechanics, the game is too easy. It could use more levels, where the enemy has more of an advantage-- I don't expect the AI to be super smart, but when I am smarter than it is and there is only one ship on the map at a time, I can overpower it easily. Also, collisions are kinda weird when you turn next to an island-- you can get yourself stuck in it.

Overall, I like this game! I hope to see you expand it, so there are more challenging levels for me to take on later.

Fairly difficult game with an interesting 3d art style.

The tutorial was a bit unclear regarding the function of the islands (specifically with how to seize control of a given island), but it was simple enough to grasp after a bit of playing. Playing it three times, I did find that the AI would fairly consistently collide enemy ships into each other and get stuck spinning. At the end, my win didn't feel deserved because three ships collided into one another and got stuck. It'd probably feel better if the islands had a slowing effect that would start to turn your ship, rather than a hard stop. When colliding with them, the islands ended up feeling a little bit 'grabby'. The concept of accuracy increasing with pirates was interesting, but I didn't feel like it was impactful enough to notice. Maybe multiple canon shots would make it more visually clear how impactful accuracy is?

Ultimately, the core concept is quite engaging, it just felt like it was lacking a bit of polish (which isn't saying too much given the timelimit). Still, a fun game that got me hooked fairly quickly into trying to overcome its challenge.

Thanks for sharing your work~

Played it a few times before I won, and when I won it was largely because two enemy ships got stuck on each other. Still a fun challenge though, fairly clever mechanics and unique art style though the execution was a bit sloppy (though ambitious!). The very short music loop was definitely starting to get a bit annoying toward the end, though it wasn't too bad at first.

I found the controls quite difficult to get the hang of to begin with, there was a lot of sudden crashing in to islands then flying off when trying to re-jig myself around a little bit 😅 but once I got the hang of what I was doing, I liked this one, a nice "tank shooting" kind of game, but with ships instead, good job! :)

For 12 hours of work this is pretty good. The controls are a bit wonky regardless of if you're using arrow keys or wasd, and the graphics look quite blurry at times which I'm not a huge fan of. Despite that, this is an interesting strategic game.

Nice pseudo-3D sprites and interesting gameplay. Impressive for 12 hours of work!

I think it would be better if changing the cannon direction would be done with Q/E, to make it easier to control the ship. I think the spritestacking on the ships looks pretty good!

Wooo! I am a pirate king

I think the idea of the game is cool and fits the theme well. I was wondering if it was intended for there to feel like there is a balance between how much crew gets left on an island and how well the ship can aim.

Portions of the gameplay on how it is meant to behave was a little confusing. I noticed sometimes that when I captured an island, I was unable to recall my pirates. However, when I sailed to an older captured island, I was able to pull a lot of pirates from it. Because of this, most of my gameplay was put a lot of pirates until an island is captured (sometimes it wouldn't be captured). Sail to another island that was previously captured, and pull pirates from there. Even though that previous island only took very few pirates to capture, I could pull more pirates than I had placed. I wasn't sure if that was intended because maybe the pirates were repopulating the island so the number of pirates on an island is meant to grow if I leave the island alone for awhile?

Combat wise, I did not end up firing cannon balls a lot. I found it easier to navigate around the enemy ships as the sea battles were pretty hard. Maybe could be balanced by powering up the cannon balls a little. As I was often around a conquered island, I did not find it too troublesome to restock on cannon balls.

There were some collision issues on the island.

I liked how the WASD controls worked. It felt kinda like playing sid meier's pirates again. Felt more natural with the way to navigate the ship. Very thematic.

Definitely some cool ways to expand this game. The mini map was really helpful when playing and made it convenient to navigate.

I failed my first try but successfully became the pirate king on my second go-around! Nice short and sweet game - I really liked the sails being the indicator of your health, as well as the pseudo 3D ships.

I am the pirate king! I had a lot of fun with this, collision was a little bit wonky next to the islands but that's a small complaint for such a complete pirate experience. The gameplay elements worked together really well, nice job!

Cool game, but a little difficult to do everything at the same time. It's pretty fun, all in all