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Fern Island's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #128 | 2.254 | 2.400 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
Solitude - you're the only person alive on the island.
Ancient Ruins - there is a set of ruins occupying the island
Infinity/Endless - you could just not fix your ship and live on the island forever if you felt like it.
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Comments
I like the idea of a survival dungeon crawler, but this one I personally thought had too many issues holding it back.
The combat feels out of place, but as you explained in another comment was added just to satisfy the rules. But I agree with the other comments here pointing out the improvemetns that could be made to it, if it isn't planned to be removed entirely.
A bug that prevented me from completing was the fact that starting a new game didn't reset health, so I would start a new game and die after taking a couple steps.
I didn't get to doing much beyond chopping trees down, fighting a couple enemies and cooking some bananas. I tried fishing but I don't actually know what I was supposed to do with it. Is fishing just random chance or was I supposed to be moving my mouse during the minigame?
I'm disappointed I didn't get to see much of this game, but I really like the concept. And I think if you gave another go at it next year or post-jam and added a decent amount of polish this idea could be great! Good work!
Hi there, thanks for this feedback and for playing. I hope you got at least some enjoyment from playing but I'm also happy to hear that you like the idea!
I can't argue with pretty much anything said here, you're absolutely right. I did manage to fix pretty much all the bugs mentioned and more since the jam was finished. I think I plan on going a bit further with this game after the jam voting closes tomorrow and just seeing where it takes me. It has been a great learning experience considering it is only the second game I've ever made.
Again, I really appreciate your feedback and kind words. Thank you :)
Interessting game for sure! The others pretty much have summed up what I wanted to say. Visuals are nice except that the combat screen looks completly differend. Movement is okay but the tile size seems rather small. The perspective seems to use a high FOV which is noticable when turning (looks really distorted).
Nitpicking aside, I had fun! Thanks for sharing.
Hi there! Thanks for the feedback :D and I'm glad you got some enjoyment out of it.
The combat was definitely an after thought added in just to meet the rules of the game jam. I should've put more work into it but didn't, lesson learned!
Thanks for the feedback on the FOV, I'll look into tweaking it asap. It is something I honestly didn't notice all that much until you and one other person mentioned it.
Again, I appreciate the feedback, thanks!
I had left the island once after dying a few times and the game went on anyway but then I managed to leave the island without dying or at least I think I did.
I think the game offers a fine gameplay loop in the context, as the hunger pressure is real but winning won't take that long either so you can restart a couple of times until you win. I smashed the very weakest enemies and fled from the other ones, which felt like the most efficient way. I'm still undecided about fishing being worth it or not, you'll really gain more food than by cutting trees, yet there's no way you'll ever have a lot of food so you have to cut the tree for the material as fast as you can and except you'll get fruits as well. Both the island environment and the animations during fights look good enough. Movement feels good enough too.
It was weird to have to press Enter during fights as you're using the mouse there.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi there, I appreciate you playing my game and the feedback here.
I think a lot of your concerns have to deal with balancing. It is something I wish I would have done more of before submitting instead of rushing in more mechanics! I lot of work since submitting has been done on balancing and I have removed combat all together, at least for the time being. I think the way you played was in fact, the most efficient way. I hope it was fun regardless. Oh, and like a bunch of the other comments have mentioned, I removed the pressing enter in combat lol!
Thanks again for the feedback, it is greatly appreciated!
The parts about the balancing were more observations than concerns ;) .
lol fair enough, I guess I was just using a common way of phrasing
The graphics are nice and handmade it seems, but I did not care for the battle system clashing with the rest. And why can´t I continue with a mouse click in the battles, but have to press Enter?!
The movement felt very nice and you have (started) to implement so many things, I think you overscoped a bit. Maybe a survival game is not the best fit for such a jam. But it was an interesing idea, as I think we only have one other game with a bit of survival mechanics. Problem there is, that I am not the biggest fan of these games, or rather that there are already to many of these games out there. It is like a couple of years ago there were sooo many zombie games and movies and at the moment everybody tries to cash in on Stardew Valley and all those first person survival games. But this is nothing against you and I like, what you made here.
hey there, I appreciate your comments and feedback!
This game didn’t actually start out as a survival game, it just sort of went there on its own during the jam! I agree that I definitely over scoped. I spent the last couple days rushing in mechanics rather than refining what I had which was a bad idea. This was my first game jam though so now I know better!
Anyway, thanks again for playing and your feedback. I truly appreciate it!
The aesthetics are pretty, and there are some neat ideas here.
However, basically every system could do with quite a bit of polish. Fishing seems like a strictly terrible idea, given its failure rate and the fact that chopping trees actually progresses your main objective and seems to drop food more often. The combo cook options are, as far as I can tell, entirely pointless since they just give the output of cooking the ingredients on their own. Combat is kinda disjointed to the rest of the game (although it seems you are already aware of that).
Nonetheless, I did do a full playthrough which you can watch here:
Hey there, thank you for playing my game and for the feedback. Especially the video! I haven’t been able to watch anyone play it yet, so it was very insightful.
I agree, everything here needs polish and major balancing work. I regret not working on that last minute. Instead I tried to make a camping system in the rock cave and things that weren’t yet necessary.
the combo recipes, while poorly balanced, are working as they were intended by having fruit give 5, fruit combos and fish giving 10, and the triple combos giving 15 percent hunger back. But yeah, really poorly balanced due to rushing.
the RNG rate for combat encounters is also awful. In your video you were getting way too many encounters, I apologize for that poor design and have already tweaked it quite a bit.
All this to say, your feedback was extremely welcomed and I am so grateful for the video to see how people besides myself approached it.
I really like the direction you went in, I was not expecting a survival game! The theme is really fun as well. I do think combat doesn't tie into the rest of the game as well as it could. When I jumped into the hole, the first thing I thought was it would be a Stardew Valley-esque dungeon that all the combat would happen in. I hope that initial reaction gives some ideas if you keep working on this!
Thank you so much for playing and for the kind words!
The combat was already removed completely actually lol. I am either considering a new direction for combat all together or having the game have no combat and be more navigation focused by building up the world. The stardew valley type dungeon is actually a really interesting idea I hadn't thought of yet! Thanks for sharing!
Anyway, I appreciate your feedback and time!
I escaped island.
It was a short good survival game. The first time I played it, I had bad luck, no food drop and no fish at all, so I died. the second time, I cleared the game smoothly. As for the combat, I wish there were some advantages to fighting, such as getting items.
You escaped! Yay!
Yes, the balancing around the RNG for drops and battles when cutting trees and fishing needs a major rebalancing. As do lots of things in the game. I focused mostly on adding in mechanics rather than balancing, for better or worse lol.
I do plan on having some drops from battles if I decide to keep battles in at all. I'm working on implementing an inventory and storage system so, drops from battle can include things like ingredients for more recipes, possibly even materials for clothing and weapons to improve damage absorption and damage dealt. What do you think?
Thanks a ton for your time and feedback!
It good. If so, it would make sense to do battle. It will be more fun with more variety in crafting.
I agree! Thanks for replying!
A very cool game base that could be really good with some polish. I think the others touched on most things, but I'm going to go by my experience too: Liked the crafting and gathering ingredients mechanics, as well as the survival aspects.
I did indeed spam fish to get a lot of fish and that's hunger taken care of :D
I crafted all the parts, but after that, the Build action did nothing, whereas up to that point it told me I don't have all the parts. I'll consider that I did finish and got off the island.
Dying also seemed to do not much, since it just let me continue with all my inventory AND the next mob I would fight would be at 0% hp, so an instant win.
If you fix these bugs and maybe add a bit more crafting variety, it's going to be quite entertaining.
Hey, thanks so much for your feedback!
The spamming fishing bug is already taken care of haha! I can't believe that bug slipped by me XD
Can you go further into detail regarding the building? Did all 3 ship part icons appear on the right side of the screen before you went over to the anvil? I just tested it out now and it is working ok, but maybe something got messed up in the build.
Thanks for pointing out the issue around dying, I did just fix this issue as well! I plan on reuploading the game with all the bug fixes after the voting period closes. And I totally plan on expanding the cooking and building mechanic to be the core focus of the game. I also fixed camping and issues around respawning at the start of the world if you go into a menu. Lots of things to come on the next update!
Thanks again for the kind words and the feedback. I greatly appreciate it!
Yeah, I had all 3 icons lit up on the right side of the screen. I even built all the parts in the go, having gathered enough materials to make all 3 at the same time. It's possible that something else broke it, like dying too many times or some other bug.
Hm, I wonder if you're right and dying caused an issue there. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I'll look into it soon and see what's causing the problem!
The idea is intersting to me. There are several things that made it really hard to play, and not in the dificulty aspect.
Combat teleports you to the ship. From one side - sure, you can heal. From another - you run to fish, you get encounter on the way, you win, you get teleported (nothing to eat), you run back to fish, get encounter - teleported back... and like that till you are dead. Happened to me several times already.
Food is scarse as a result of such mechanic. Unless you spam fish and lucky with no encounter spawned.
Not sure what combined recipies do, since it felt like I am wasting resources (that already may be an issue) by making them.
Combat would be fine IF there won't be need to press enter every time. Actually could use space, just like everywhere else, would be less tedious on hand movements.
But potential is right there - core mechanics and systems are already implemented, just couple of strokes there and there and it will be very nice gameplay loop indeed!
Hi NikaKh!
Thanks for your feedback on the game. I am actually working on the issue of being brought back to the ship today. It is very frustrating to have to start back at the ship every time, I agree! I also have put in a buffer to no longer allow fishing to be spammed. Overall, the game needs a tremendous amount of work on balancing, so thank you for bringing those issues up.
cooking any fruit + fruit should be increasing hunger by 10% while cooking them on their own will only restore 5%. Cooking anything with fish should restore 15%. It seems to be working when I run the game but it could be an issue I am unaware of. I'll look into it! Again, this mechanic needs balancing and I plan to add more options for combinations and explicit texts explaining all of this in game. Let me know what you think I should add in!
Lastly, combat came out more rough than I had hoped overall. I've actually removed the combat and random encounters all together to focus more on the survival aspect of this game. I envision a much larger world that focuses on survival and navigation more than anything. Camping has already been fixed in preparation for making longer journeys once the world size increases. I want the game to focus,eventually, on the fog aspect of the island and what is causing it.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and for playing! I appreciate it!
Hmmm... food giving different values would be tricky to show so they would be easy to understand at glance. Maybe make square frame around recipies that also color coded and shows number of restoration % on top of it? If I remember correctly you already had sorting with 'just fruits' and 'fish'. So lets say normal food in a white frame with 5% on top of it, fruit combos squared idk, yellow, with 10% on top of it and fish blue with 15%. On paper seem intuitive enough and could work. But need testing, ofc...
About adding in... maybe simple meats? Crabs and such? You can also fight those for their meat!
Good luck with the game! Its surely can be something grand on its own!
NikaKh, thank you so much for wishing me good luck. Since this whole game was an on-the-fly idea, it has been rapidly evolving! I really like your idea of color coding. I think a mix of shapes and colors could really be the ticket to communicating what I need to to the player. It's certainly a good though!
Crab meat and the like are things I hadn't thought of either. My brain went to iguanas and birds for some reason? Haha!
I appreciate your comment! I'll give your submission a try this weekend :D
I really like survival games, and there is always nice with crafting and cooking systems. The core settings of the game is nice and has great potential. That said I were not able to complete the game, but I tried several times and think I completed most of the content. Below are some of my remarks from playing which I hope will help in improving the game and gameplay.
After dying and restarting the game your inventory is kept from before as well as your stats, which makes you instantly die.
Controls - A bit annoying to have to use WASD to move around Enter to exit menus and mouse to click buttons with only two hands.
Store -Couldn't get the Store to work.
UI - Ba, Pi, Co and Fi is a bit hard to interpret maybe have them as icons instead?
Cooking - Seems like all ingredients give 5% to hunger and combined recipes don't give any additional hunger. So player can as well just cock them one by one. Its hard to figure out what recipes you can cook from the inventory. Maybe have food contribute more to the health to make it playable. Finding a food and cooking it takes more energy than you get back from it.
Combat - Each action in combat takes like 5% of the players hunger bar, that's like one food item. Which drains you out of energy since combat usually needs more than one action to complete. Maybe not have player reset the island and placed at start position after each encounter. I t makes exploring hard. The food heals a bit but it feels impossible to keep up with the hunger no matter how much you eat. I am normally not a fan of random encounters but if you use them please have them only appear on movement and changing position. These random encounters seems to happen on a random timer.
Fishing - Spamming Space while fishing makes you gain fish repeatable
Work - After completing all Sail, Rudder and Steering wheel, the options to create the again is available. I did not find a way to leave the island with these three items.
Spirit - The spirit in the ground did nothing from what I can see. Not sure if he is supposed to be fought or help you escape.
View - Maybe the tiles could be a bit bigger.
Hey wolfheat! Thanks for your comments! They are really constructive and so I greatly appreciate it. I am sorry to hear you weren't able to complete the game. I was aware of some of these issue but just due to time couldn't get to them. I plan on fixing them soon though and I hope you come back after that to try it out again.
The inventory being kept after death is actually something I wasn't aware of, so thank you so much for making that known to me.
I agree, the controls need work. They took a bit of a back seat to other things that, in retrospect, weren't as important.
The store was an eleventh hour idea that I should've scrapped for this prototype. It doesn't actually work yet, I just left it in to convey the idea that there will be one in the future. I should've indicated that somehow.
Yes! The UI is actually something I am planning on getting to asap. My wife mentioned early on that the Ba, Pi, Co, and Fi were hard to interpret. It is among 1 of the many issues I have with my UI.
The cooking does in fact need balancing. The fish are the only thing that give 10% health while all fruit give 5%. I thought that cooking fruit together gave 10% and and fruit + fish combo gave 15% but I might have over looked that so I'll give it another look. Either way, there needs to be a lot of balancing work done.
Now the combat, I actually don't want my final product to have any combat at all. It was only added for the game jam rules! It seems like the cooking and combat system just need balancing overall, and I appreciate you pointing that out. My final product is going to ditch combat all together and make a much larger world where the focus is on navigation and survival.
I wasn't aware of the fishing spam thing, I'll fix that too. Again, I'm so glad you pointed that out.
After completing the 3 ship parts, did you try clicking on the anvil in the ship? That should end the game for you, but maybe it is also bugged. Being unable to remake the parts in the work menu does not convey that at all though, so it is no fault of your own. It was my poor design there.
The spirit does nothing currently, again due to time constraints. If you hit him enough, he send you back to the menu screen after a short text box. That's about it for now unfortunately. I don't know if I plan on keeping him or the underground section at all in the main game. I might even remove the ruins. Thanks for mentioning it, if you have any suggestions here, I'm all ears!
Lastly, the view. I'm not sure how I feel about the tile size. This is my first dungeon crawler and I've never really played many so I don't have a ton of opinion here. Either way, thanks for mentioning it.
Overall, thanks again for your time and for playing. This was a great comment!
I am glad you took my comment as constructive since that is sincerely what it was. I think these jams are a great way for us developers to evolve and having fellow game devs give feedback is invaluable in out pursuit of making our games better!
I didn't click the anvil. I just did a replay of the game now and yes that do complete the game thank you.
So if I get you correctly, you basically wanted to make a island survival game, but these jams restrictions made you enforce combat and ruins. :) I find that funny somehow.
As a first dungeon crawler I would say it is still decent. It is a bit of a tricky genre but it does have it's charm. According to the tile size it mostly applies to narrow hallways, but it makes it easier to navigate. I don't think you have to change that since you got other stuff thats more important to focus on.
Agreed, feedback from other devs is like gold. That is why I truly appreciate the time you took to play it.
I'm glad the anvil worked! I just need to communicate that better to the player next time.
Yeah, I actually hopped on this jam last minute because I got a week off from work and my wife went on vacation so I was home alone for a week and wanted to use it for a jam. This one was just right on time.
Thanks for the compliment, as someone who has only played a small handful of crawlers, I was nervous I would totally miss the mark. The genre has a table top/old school feel to me that is the most charming in my opinion.
Lastly, I see what you mean about the tile size now. I'll certainly look into it after some of my larger changes.
Anyway, thanks again! I'm planning on trying our your submission sometime this week!
Overall a nice idea, but the controlls need refinement and the random battles seemed to harsh to me, as the survival part is blocked by them heavily. Further, I would wish for a higher contrast and readability of the geometry. Everything seems to blend into each other, making playing the game kind of straining.
Hi SunSailor,
Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!
I'll definitely work on the controls as others have pointed out and plan on actually scrapping the combat all together as of now. Maybe replacing it with some basic simple RTC if needed.
Thank you for pointing out the issues regarding contrast and readability. I'll look into messing with some lighting and color palettes. I just used the assets as is.
Again, thanks for your time, for playing, and for your feedback. Btw, I played your submission and very much enjoyed the atmosphere!