Skyland Online

How awesome to make an mmo for a jam game! Ambitious for sure but you pulled it off, so great job you all!

There were a few things I think could be improved about the UI. It's not very clear what the bottom left number means (I did figure it out though) and I would've liked to see the costs of each buildable thing in game. And it felt a bit confusing to join the game because I had no way of knowing if there were any other people online - maybe a list of active players would be useful or maybe even show arrows on the sides of the screen that point towards other players?

It was fun playing with everyone during Peter's stream. Despite the connectivity hickups it was all fun in its chaos :)

This is a very ambitious project to take on, and the execution was really well done. The animations and feel of the weapons were really satisfying. It would be cool to have more things to interact with in the world, but what you were able to get done is super impressive. Great work!

Whew, I had a feeling I visited this game past the time where everyone was playing it :( it was a little sad for me, especially since I was having fun with the terraforming! It didn't feel very intuitive due to the lack of tutorialization* or logic (although let's be honest, having a tractor dig up the ground from the bottom of your island is also fun in its own way), but it also had a fun sense of freedom to it that games with more 'logical' rules don't tend to have. If I want to make my island shaped like a helicopter landing pad, put 10 cannons on the surface and have a sail around? I can go right ahead and do that! Was a nice little bit of fun. Shame I couldn't fight anyone else though :(

*And to be fair, completing a game with fully-functioning online in a gamejam timeframe? That's a crazy feat in of itself!

Aaaaaaahhhhhh!

It took me a lot longer than it should to realise that you can remove your island ground to get some rock, especially because there was nobody online at the time of me playing so it seemed to be no other way to get this - I think some hover over instructions for things like costs and what they produce, and more ways to gather rock, would make a world of difference here.

But, nitty gritty aside, on a positive note, it is massivley ambitious to do an online game and I am so impressed that you've accomplished that. The graphics and design all work well together and are charming. The gameplay itself is unique and interesting and it's really well executed. I think a lot of the enjoyment of this game just tends to hang in the balance of if you have other people online to join you - incredible feat which is a lot to teeter on a small audience for sure, but really well made all the same :) good job!

Always impressive whenever someone makes games with onilne features, and especially so when it's a literal mmo!

I had some trouble getting the game playable. It seems to absolutely hate my internet connection. The game lags a ton and often loses connection constantly. My internet is extremely slow, mind you, 20 down and 2 up, but other online games run just fine. Is this game sending huge amounts of data constantly or something? xD After bashing my head at it for a while, I tried doing network tethering off my phone, whose connection is like 10 times my PC's wired connection. Finally the game ran smoothly.

It took me a bit to figure out how to play the game. I didn't know I should use the bulldozer option on the dirt tiles of my island until I randomly noticed a differently shaped island in a screenshot. I never met any other players online, only bots, so I couldn't gather more stone than what spawned on my island..

I played for a while a few days ago and just tried again, to see if the connection was better and if I could find some other players but no :( I'm sure it's a lot of fun under the right conditions, it definitely feels like the foundation is there for that!

Really nice! I liked the artstyle and the smooth zooming in/out. I did get a couple of connection errors, and when I got reconnected my island looked different with holes in them. I did come across a player I think but they were a lot faster than me and I don't know how or why. Maybe I had too many cannons? Does that influence your speed? I'm also not sure what the bots do, they didn't give me any stone or anything.

Super fun concept! Would really like to see this more fleshed out/polished one day. Well done!

I had played this earlier in the week with one of my teammates but decided to get a small group of four together to play it and see how it went. The online was seemless and incredibly impressive for a 48 hour jam. As we were playing, I was building up a super island and my friends were noticing that for some reason I was moving faster than them. We did all sorts of experimenting with FPS, monitor refresh rates and it seemed to make a difference. I was using 144hz and had high client fps, and once they increased their refresh rate we seemed to be moving at the same speed. One of my friends limited their fps and their island was moving extremely slowly. Not sure on the details of all that but thought it was interesting.

As for the gameplay itself - I think the base idea of building your island, adding more cannons and hunting down other islands to be a pretty fun loop. Sometimes I did feel like people were being a bit spawn camped and occasionally had someone respawn next to me a few times which lead to their instant death. I tried building the crops a few times but I felt like I was better off just building a super island of cannons and bricks roaming around like a death machine. I had a lot of fun playing it online with my friends, not something I can typically say about gm48 games! The game also had a very clean look that I felt fit the gameplay really well.

Overall, extremely impressive that you managed to implement something like this in 48 hours. Great job!

This looks great and I'd love to play, but immediately after typing my username, I am met with "Could not connect to server... retrying connection" and it just hangs there forever. I've restarted the game several times, but no luck. Any suggestions?

EDIT: It works now! Real feedback below. :)

Interesting game with a significant amount of content made for the 48 hours! Well done!

This was really cool, I liked zooming in close on the island

Brilliantly done. Can't believe a game with online multiplayer like this can be done in 48 hours! That's incredible.

I love the idea of growing an island and battling it out. Super fun concept. Harvesting resources... blasting people... such good fun.

It was a little difficult to understand at first. The cannons firing while you're trying to do econ tasks and build is a little distracting. Wish the tile placement was a little easier to do.

Took awhile to understand the crystals recharged your shield. I was shooting at them the first time I spawned in and wondering why they weren't "breaking". Some player feedback for your actions would be nice there.

Cannons were very satisfying to use. The land management of figuring out where to put your cannons and grow farms was fun. That being said, I wish there was more econ stuff to do. There were instances were crops didn't feel like they were harvesting and the bots didn't feel like they were dropping stone. Would love to see more of the econ side of things built out. I didn't see a lot of benefit to building crops out more vs. just cannon-ing it up.

Honestly super super impressive to get all this done. I had so much fun blasting my teammate and playing against each other. So many gm48 jam games I've played I've thought: Oh this would be fun in multiplayer. I can't believe there is one that has actually done it!

Also wonderful take on the theme. When I think of "Island" I definitely think a little on resource management and gunning it up for tower defense. This combined it so wonderfully with a multiplayer I enjoy an will definitely be getting back in to play more!

(Had a minor connection issue where the server was not reconnecting me but I restarted the game and managed to get in.)

This is a really impressive feat for just 48 hours. All in all, the game wasn't the most fun since I just got destroyed immediately by another player each time, but I'm sure he was having fun so that's not really the game's fault. Having a few more options and making the cannons not disappear when shooting down on your own island would be nice. Definitely a runner-up for most impressive!

Not much direction given to new players in-game. If you were to polish some things up this would be a good online browser game.

Hey there!

Fun little concept, well put together given the time worked on it. With that in mind, some thoughts on what I'd consider to be improved (I don't expect you're planning to work on this more, but maybe can help in the future?)

1. Controls are generally fine, though I feel if you could select your 'Item' with numbers, it would flow a lot better. Say you hit 1, you can place crops, 2 cannons, 3 blocks and so on. Would also be handy if you could place blocks continuously, maybe as a swap to build mode vs attack mode, or similar. Either one would be handy to help allow building quickly, which is definitely a must for a game like this.

2. I feel like death comes way too easily - the idea is to make the island bigger, but doing so in a traditional manner means very little. You can have 100 cannons, and the biggest island on the map - but one guy with a cannon above you can wipe you out in seconds, with no way to retaliate.

3. Along those last lines, it would be nice if there was some way to attack from below that was consistent. As it is now, it seems like whoever is above the other automatically wins - cannons can't shoot very high, you can't catch up to an opponent going up as they're the same speed, and you can't escape for the same reason. The game is very much based on pure positional luck, as opposed to outmanuervering your opponent, or even simply having more resources gained. Perhaps smaller islands move faster, thus rewarding 'riskier' play? But of course, that change would mean a bigger island would still need some way to actually fight back, so maybe a different cannon type that hits high - unsure, just some thoughts!

4. Only other major thing I noticed is that magic is simply unfun to collect - and because of the way combat ends up working here, doesn't feel very rewarding most of the time. If they bounced a lower distance away, or simply didn't at all, that would likely be preferable. Maybe making mana easier to collect, but in lower amounts more spread across the map could help. It can take a while at times to find any.

Again - GREAT stuff, really fun concept and don't expect more from it given the time constraints, nor expecting an 'update' of any sort. Just thought I'd give my 2 cents on what I noticed while playing.

Great work guys!

you use GmNETengine?