What Is An Island Without Water?

Love the title! Really cool, clever puzzle game, I don't think I've seen this concept anywhere. Very brain-intensive game haha my mind was whirring trying to calculate the path the water was going to take. It's definitely a hard game, I wonder if there's a way to design the levels to guide the player a bit more. I haven't done all the levels yet but I'm definitely coming back to this to get those golds. Great job!

Is this the most beatiful or polished game? No. However, I think this is one of the most creative games I've seen in this jam. The theme of island is difficult because its mostly aesthetic -- any game set on an island could match the theme. This game goes deeper than that and ties the idea of "island" into the gameplay itself, which is what a jam theme should really do IMO. Great job!

That being said, less is more in terms of levels, especially for a game jam. I'd stick to maybe just 10 levels, and in each develop a single idea. It's great that there is so much here, but I think just a handful of levels that guide the player through the game's ideas could be easier to digest.

This is a really interesting idea, and I spent quite a bit of time with it. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with Tiny Islands, so I don't know what elements are similar, but the main thing I liked was the process of learning the way in which the water flows out and behaves in conjunction with different objects that can be placed in its path. Once you have that figured out, creating islands in the way you plan is very satisying. It's entirely possible that there are aspects I'm using the wrong way, but it was alot of fun figuring things out.

I think a tutorial would be helpful in lowering the uninitiated player into the game, and I think there's scope for a graphical overhaul, but there's something pretty cool going on here. I could see myself playing this on the morning commute and missing my stop...

Very clever use of the theme! I like the somewhat weird aesthetic.

Whoa really liked it! It was fun to experiment with the system en try to make as many islands as possible. Wasn't a bit fan of the looping background art though haha.

But yeah this was a really unique game and I love that so much. I like how the controls were you actually walking and pushing things. It increases the immersion a lot for me compared to doing puzzle games like this with the mouse and just dragging objects. Impressed by the amount of levels too, I did them all but mostly got bronze eventhough I redid a couple of a levels

I think this is a clever idea for a puzzle game with a lot more depth than it initially appears, you've got an interesting piece here that requires a lot of thinking, good job! :)

Really neat idea for a puzzle game - I'm not sure I've ever seen mechanics like this before, which isn't common for a puzzle game. And it was a really unique, clear take on the theme, too.

I also appreciated that you didn't need to "perfectly" solve every level, there was always room to go back and improve my levels or simply move on if stuck.

Great work!

Huh, really unique mechanic for a sokoban-like! Normally, these types of games make 2 mistakes: Using overdone mechanics, or not having enough levels. You don't have either of these issues, and what's there is pretty polished, interesting, and fun!

As for the stuff that could be improved-- It's not really clear how the scoring works without experimenting with it a lot, and the cutoffs for good rankings in all the levels is also not obvious at first glance. I'd love to experiment with the mechanics and try and do a good job, but that's hard when the game doesn't tell me what a good job consists of.

Overall, a really unique idea, and that gets you a lot of bonus points from me, especially considering the timeframe. Nice work!

Nice puzzler with a really clever concept! I get how it works, but I'm terrible at strategizing what items need to be moved to the optimal places to create good islands, so I scored pretty poorly in every stage (even after making heavy use of the Undo button). XD

I like the Windows 95-esque graphics style (reminds me of your other jam game, Worldwide Remote Access Network), and the eerie tribal music works well. Nice work!

This game has so much quiet vibrant personality. I love the crusty, almost aggressively developer-y art, and the weird lilting ancient-sounding spooky almost ceremonial-sounding music. And of course the cryptic game mechanics that feel like they're based on a logic that I'm too sane to fully appreciate. I mean this in the best possible way - it's like this is a game that comes bundled with TempleOS.

Wow, what a nice idea! It's like a mixture of Sokoban and some City Building board games I have played before where get positive and negative points based on the buildings in your area. I felt the game quite challenging for me, but I was able to get Gold on several levels. I feel like a lot of puzzle games you see are focused on clicking a switch and opening a door to escape, and while they can promote creativity from the player they tend to have optimal solutions that are easier to see. I'm not saying your game doesn't have optimal solutions, but while playing it I had this feeling that the game was completely open to my experimentation and creativity. Overall, a great take on the theme!

Cool idea! It was still a little ethereal for me, but it was well executed. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around it, but that's probably just me.

I played your game on stream, heres the link https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1091776398?t=51m46s

its an neat puzzle game, but I kept skiping levels when I didn't mean to.

Though the graphics aren't particularly great, I do enjoy a good puzzle. I'll have to play this one again when I'm not so tired and short on time, so I can appreciate the puzzles more. PS. the rocks certainly look like gravestones, is this intentional?

Love this game. It's like if sokoban and those old area clearing games like jezzball had a weird baby. I am into it. Well, it's also frustrating and makes me feel like an absolute idiot, but that's sokoban for ya!

As suggested I started playing without reading sections 3 and 4. Trying to figure out scoring made for some interesting trial and error. Having read those now it turns out I figured out everything correctly! Except from the quirk about multiplier tiles not counting for normal points—after I read that I just managed to get gold on another level lol.

I only have minor complaints. Being able to speed up scoring is great, but it'd be cool if you could hold that button down at any time to also speed up movement and rewinding. Often I'd start rewinding to go back to some state, be annoyed the speed, and instead just rage-restart entirely even if that is probably technically slower lol.

I did find what I assume is a bug, where cliffs sometimes spawn their beaches in the wrong direction, see this gif. Time for a footnote 3.1 🤓

This is what my scores look like at the moment. I will come back to attempt to get gold on the remaining 4 levels later. My baby brain has hit a wall and needs rest.

Update: Level 7 and 8 now upgraded from silver to blue

Update: Level 11 at 345, level 12 at 690, still both silver. Jesus I don't understand these levels XD

Given the complexity of the rules, it was pretty easy to start learning and improving on scores through trial and error :) I would have added a score popup for everything that is scored, though, as it took me quite a while to figure out that island size mattered too. Maybe just a popup at the end of the red squares filling in that totals the size score?

Really unique and fun idea, I hope you keep working on it!

Love the puzzle concept, took me a few tries to understand what to do though. The "star" background is pretty brutal on the eyes though.

This game is so fantastic!

I love the concept of it so much. Fits beautifully with the theme. Very interesting interpretation of it. The mechanics reminded me very positively of trying to figure out Minecraft water physics. It was a lot of fun to see how each object interacted and what they gave. I decided to play it a little blind first before checking out the description so figuring out what happens when each item breaks was cool. Particularly the cliff turning into beaches.

I know it's hard to put everything you need in a limited amount of time but as always, you prioritising the level design over the polish really ups the addictiveness of the game. Really loved going through the levels.

Some quality of life stuff I think I'd have liked is maybe a way to mark out where you plan to put an item on the score screen. When the level resets, I think my brain shuts down a little on the memory portion on what I'd like to try next. And sometimes I end up placing an item a square off. I find it hard to estimate/remember where I want them once the island resets so things sometimes were a square off. I guess that could be part of the gameplay so fair enough. Maybe if you could turn a visible grid on and off it'd have helped with placement too. I found myself having to calculate where the water was going to go from the beginning again because I couldn't remember one change I would like to try out.

Maybe a way to see the islands immediately rather than watching them fill up at the score screen would make me feel better too. I want to know the score and quickly jump in to try get my score better rather than waiting too long.

I think the sokoban puzzle aspect of it was very interesting as well. I was going to suggest a way to drag obstacles to be in certain places to speed up placement when I've repeated a level lots of times but then realised you'd miss out on the really cool puzzle that some items just can't be dragged up and down as they're on an edge.... maybe a way to limit where they're dragged depending where they're placed but at that point it seems overcomplicating it. Just noticed sometimes I wander around the map a lot and forget what I need to do. Though that's a personal problem. Haha.... my memory D: Think markers I can place down on the score screen I can refer back to would be helpful.

The sandboxy experimental nature of this coupled with some clever level design really made this so fun and unique for me.

Absolutely fantastic job!