Renowned treasure hunter Hannah has washed ashore on a mysterious island. Every day she awakes the island has transformed completely.

Help Hannah to discover the flora and fauna of the island, as well as the ancient artifacts buried beneath the soil.

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  • Nyveon
    Patron

    Is the content procedual? There's a lot of stuff to collect!

    I really hope there wasn't an ending, because I'm not sure if I have the time to discover all the creatures hahaha. Really cool entry though, love the 3d-like effect and the colors/sprites of the game. My main feedback would be that sound effects would have added a lot (But I assume adding individual sound effects for each creature and item might have been impossible :P) Additionaly, the screen was soo tiny on a UHD monitor, having a way to scale or fullscreen would have been nice.

    Overall a quite impressive entry though! Well done :D

  • havik
    Patron

    Cool idea, nice art style. The rotating camera was a nice surprise too. The gameplay itself is a bit lacking - I got tired pressing Z lots and walking around so I didn't finish the game (there are so many things to collect!).

    It's well polished though, just needed some sounds!

    Oh and - welcome to GM48 :D Now you're here, you can't leave, just ask Allie!

  • Veralos
    Lv. 38

    Very cute game. I like the idea and it's impressive just how much stuff there is to collect. Unfortunately it's a bit excessive - I got up to ~80 wildlife, ~50 flowers and ~40 artifacts before calling it quits. The game doesn't change much so over time so I think a smaller list would be better. That's said, it is pretty novel and did enjoy it for a bit.

    The art is really nice. I like the limited pallete and how all the animals are easily indentifiable despite the small size. The rotating camera is cool too. An option to go fullscreen would be appreciated though.

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thanks for the feedback! Yeah as the flowers / animals / artifacts sort of have "genetics" I ended up with 125 varieties of each.

      5 colors x 5 "Types" x 5 "Variants" = 125 of each thing.

      I knew collecting 625 objects would probably be a big ask for most jammers so I should maybe have added some sort of pat on the back at a total of 100 or something to make the game feel more "complete".

  • Fachewachewa
    Patron

    Ok, I got bored pretty fast, but I love this idea. Even with the few "shortcuts" I noticed, I'm impressed by the quantity of content for a jam, and I understand why the game isn't "more". I really wish there was some music tho :(

    Shrinkoban
    Submitted

    Shrinkoban

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thanks, I'd like to use the idea again at some point but with more time to make the game the best it can be (including music and sound effects :) )

  • Tero Hannula
    Patron

    I enjoyed bit of my time collecting stuff, but well I don't have means to use macro keys so spamming keys didn't feel good after while so ended my journey. And there are lot of things to collect, my keyboard will break before collecting them all :D But I liked visuals, too bad there is no sounds.

  • baku
    Patron

    Absolutely love the visuals of this, which makes it even more disappointing that the game is so shallow 😕 However, as I loved the look and I love collecting things, I kept playing this for a while!

    Like Tobymoby below, I quickly set up a macro that would spam Z, so all I had to do was walk around the little island, pressing R every once in a while. But after a handful minutes, I got tired of that...

    However, as I've been playing too much Animal Crossing lately and being only 2 fossils away from finishing that section of the museum, only having gotten duplicates for what feels like an eternity, my drive for finishing things is very strong right now. I was not gonna give up completing this game that easily, even if it did go against my drive to play the rest of the games as well (still a lot to go through!)

    So I set up a second macro that would run through a series of timed key presses to first position Hannah in the bottom right of the island, then comb over every spot, and finally move to the next day - i.e. play the game automatically. This is obviously a very naïve approach to playing the game. Flowers and artifacts spawn much more often than wildlife, and respawning wildlife is ignored by this macro - however given enough time it should eventually discover every type of treasure.

    Confident as I was, I started it up, and went to take a shower, expecting to come back to a guidebook perfectly filled with every flower, wildlife and artifact. During the shower, excitement turned to fear. "What if there's some sort of cool congratulations-message at the end, that the macro will just skip right through?" I would've beaten the game like a dirty cheater, and might miss the reward entirely. All of my efforts would have been for nothing!

    Some 30 minutes later, I returned to my computer with great anticipation. What would my progress look like? I stopped the macro, and checked the guidebook:

    • Flowers: 125 / 125 🎉

    • Artifacts: 125 / 125 🎉

    • Wildlife: ...81 / 125 😱

    ...so anyway, thanks for listening to my Ted Talk about RNG and diminishing returns.

    (also please remember to let people fullscreen your games in the future, cause it's tiny >.<)

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thanks for the detailed review!

      I too have been playing a lot of Animal Crossing and get pretty upset with the RNG haha. I have missed a few of the rarer fish that are now out of season because the game flat refused to spawn them in 140 hours of gameplay.

      That's why I intentionally made it so that each Island in my game will always spawn at least 1 new flower and 1 new artifact (so the max islands you will ever have to visit to complete those sections of the guidebook is 125, fewer in reality because most objects on the first few islands will be brand new by chance).

      The Wildlife spawns depending on what types of squares are nearby. (SPOILERS / Guide for that is here https://danjohnston.uk/games-wiki/games/game.php?id=108 )

      Wildlife color is completely random, so if you encounter an extremely rare creature like a Horseshoe Crab, your best bet for completing the guidebook is to stay on that island and keep waiting for the wildlife in that one spot to respawn. A bit suckier than the plants & artifacts I know, but I wanted to add some actual depth to the mechanics.

      Anyway, thank you for taking a lot of time & care to provide feedback. Really impressed with the auto-player you made! :)

  • Hyper Freeze Games
    Lv. 17

    First of all, the art stly is amazing! It looks really cool. I would just loove to explore a world in this style, maybe in a Zelda-like game or something or another type of RPG. Sprites etc look nice and the 3D-ish camera rotation is neat.

    Gameplay-wise, there didn't appear to be a lot to do. So just tapping Z and collecting stuff got very repetitive to a point where I was asking myself if I was missing something or doing something wrong. Initially, I really wanted to collect everything and finish the game, but after 50 minutes of running around and collecting stuff with a keyboard macro that smashes "Z", I finally gave up because I was not having fun anymore. I had all the flowers, nearly all the artifacts, but animals were still sitting at 80.

    I think as part of a bigger game, where you could do something with the collected stuff, maybe sell it, maybe craft something or maybe battle with the animals (idk? haha) this could be pretty awesome. Similarly with the rotating camera, you didn't actually need it, so I stopped using it. It would have been cooler if you needed it to look around cliffs or something.

    Also it's a shame there is no charming music or sound effects :/ would have added a lot to the (already very present) charm of the game!

    I like your style a lot (not just directly graphically, but the overall feel of the mechanics etc) so I'm looking forward to more games in the future :)

    EDIT: Oh one more small thing. As a guy from germany, "Z" is always unpractical for me and a lot of other countries with QWERTZ keyboards. So at least adding Y as an alternative input for Z is never a bad idea. :D

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thank you! I'm really impressed you managed to collect so many of the items. I agree this would be good as a side-aspect of a much bigger RPG or something, I do tend to reuse mechanics from my jam games in bigger projects later on so I may do this some justice ;)

      Very good point about support QWERTZ keyboards - it never occurred to me. I will try to remember in future to add an alternate key such as "Y" for that purpose.

  • Allison James
    Patron

    Suggested alternative title: Danimal Crossing 😄

    This was very cute, I wish someone had done music for it because there was room for a lot of atmosphere in it - but the content quantity was extremely impressive even just with colour variants, and I'm pretty sure I'll be coming back to this at some point to continue playing. Nice one!

  • illdie
    Lv. 12

    I 100% love the aesthetic of this game, and moving the camera around feels great. I do wish there was something more to the actual play, as just tapping to pick up items doesn't carry it very far. I'd be interested to see how the idea would be developed further if you were to ever expand/revisit it. Congrats on your first gm48!

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thanks! appreciate the feedback. It is a bit simplistic in game play terms due to the time frame - but I might make something similar in future with more features.

  • Chris
    Patron

    I was really wanting some sound effects or music but I totally get it, I didn't have time to put sound effects in my game and I totally planned on it.

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Yeah I didn't have enough time either - it could definitely benefit from at least a little audio feedback when you click plants and stuff.

  • Atomic
    Lv. 19

    I liked the art style. It's very DOS like, which is always aesthetically pleasing. I also enjoyed the shear amount of things you could find, but the ways of which to find them was a bit simplistic for my taste. The animations brought everything to life, and the programming aspect was impressive. Everything was really neat and well crafted. I didn't find myself looking through the guidebook all that much, because the information there wasn't interesting, and it was hard to get to the things you found. Maybe I just didn't play for long enough for things to pick up, but nothing was indicating more was to come. I still enjoyed playing it, but it has little replay value to me, personally.

    cat game
    Submitted

    cat game

  • ceaselessly
    Lv. 8

    Nice game! I enjoyed the concept and the camera controls a lot, and the art is so cute. I understand some of the imbalance is due to the tight deadline, so it'd be cool to see what a more balanced version of this game looked like. Also, was there any audio, or was that a problem on my end?

  • The Great Gatsby
    Lv. 9

    pretty fun, though it seemed a little repetitive, and It was hard to recognize that I actually had a goal. great controls and mechanic though

  • Panda-K
    Lv. 17

    This is such a cute little game!

    The animals kept respawning for me (without starting a new day), is that intentional? I think the game would flow better with collecting everything and then starting a new day.

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Yes the animals respawning is intentional. I did this to make completion quicker / easier since I didn't have time to do more balancing. The flowers and artifacts give you at least 1 new unique item per island, whereas the animals appear based on the tiles around them (so I let them respawn indefinitely so it's easier to complete them)

  • Animalization
    Lv. 1

    When I booted it up the controls were a bit daunting, but once I got used to it I really enjoyed it. I spent way more time than I would have thought just walking around and adding new species to my little book, the artstyle is really good too and everything fits the theme really well. Great job on this!

    • GameDevDan
      Lv. 5
      GameDevDan Developer of Lost Little Island

      4yrs ago

      Thanks! Given more time I would have done a more hand-holdy tutorial to get people used to the controls. Something I'll keep in my back pocket for future games.

I got some pretty good feedback on the game itself, and I'm sure I'll factor those in to a future project. I probably won't update lost little island - but I do want to reuse the mechanics for a bigger, more ambitious project and the reviews I got here will definitely help make that the best that it can be!

My biggest takeaway from gm48 as a first time entrant is that the voting system is better setup to reward teams than individuals (unlike, say, the GMC Jam). Not being able to create my own audio for the game hit my final score quite hard, next time I'll have to buddy up and see what happens!

Result 45th
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