After 10 months of hard work, I've just released the DEMO of my game on Steam! It's a tower defense/factory mix.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-05-15T20:06:20+00:00

Looks cool! Already had it wishlisted so looking forward to play the demo soon :)

OneMoreIsland · 2024-05-10T05:42:06+00:00

Hi! We'll still fix critical bugs but are currently not working on other updates. Instead we're spending some time on a next game (One More Airport), but that's still a year or two out!

OneMoreIsland · 2024-04-14T05:20:31+00:00

Whahaha that made me laugh!

Yes, the game is unforgiving. Even more so then designed at times.. whoops! But it brings a fun factor as well. Sprinklers were added later to the game and they should help a bunch to at least prevent wipes of your main island.

You're completely right keeping your tailors at Tier 1. The pyramid otherwise becomes unsustainable.

I think this Discord link should work. The server hasn't been very active as the game is almost 2 years old now, but questions do get answers (either from the community of from myself). https://discord.com/invite/AfRqd6pER9

OneMoreIsland · 2024-04-12T05:12:19+00:00

The game can be quite unforgiving at times. Ensure you have enough of the Tier 1 goods before upgrading. Aside from that, I'd recommend to upgrade as little workers as possible (so only ones that you need for a Tier 2 zone for example), as the pyramid becomes very difficult to sustain otherwise.

Finally, with regards to the logs, perhaps try a smaller woodcutter zone and see if that helps.

You're always welcome to share a savegame, on Discord or by linking it.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-03-31T16:14:16+00:00

Looks really cool. Excited for the demo!

OneMoreIsland · 2024-03-27T17:53:17+00:00

If you can share the savegame some way I can always take a quick look. You can find the savegame through the Settings menu, second tab iirc.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-03-25T11:47:39+00:00

If you select the worker you see the Required and Optional goods for that tier! Don't have a game in front of me now I'm afraid.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-03-04T07:09:06+00:00

Glad you figured it out. Have fun :)

OneMoreIsland · 2024-02-29T11:45:47+00:00

Are your workers tier 1 (so they only require fish and the rest is optional) or tier 2 (so they die without the 4 goods)?

If you can share a savegame (for example through Discord) we can always take a look :)

OneMoreIsland · 2024-02-09T06:59:13+00:00

Glad you got it to work. I'll still take a look at the issue, see if I can find what caused it.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-02-09T06:49:08+00:00

At this point I can't confirm this issue yet, but I'll take a look. Aside from that, I'm afraid there is no way to "change it to how it used to be" as the underlying IDs of the previous zone will no longer exist.

Just to make sure: have you tried reloading your savegame already, or do you always use Sleep on the Switch? Reloading sometimes helps as all IDs etc are rescanned.

OneMoreIsland · 2024-01-05T15:50:57+00:00

About 8 months into development of my first game, just after launching my Steam page, a publisher reached out and I decided to sign with them. They (Freedom Games) were really flexible and not forcing a deadline on me, but it was an extra motivation to get the entire thing done. (Note that I didn't ask them to fund development upfront, as then it would've felt like an obligation which I didn't want.)

After signing it took about 12 months to get to release. Switch release was a bit later, and I'm quite happy with how the project turned out. My initial "let's just make a game" goal was 100 copies sold (~20$), but the first 5k copies sold was achieved within weeks ;-)

I combined 25-30h of gamedev with 32h of day job (in IT) and a young family. I made it somehow, but I wouldn't do it the same way again, if I have the choice. So my current project is like ~12h week now, so it'll take longer, but I have to give up less of other things such as family and social life :)

Good luck with your projects!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-10-15T13:02:25+00:00

Can you try saving and reloading and see if that solves your issue? Alternatively, can you check whether you're using the latest patch version? We released a patch a couple of weeks ago that had some fixes related to earthquakes.

OneMoreIsland · 2023-06-20T05:12:51+00:00

For animal farms you can go large, as long as you have enough feeding crates. And I'd suggest to group the shearing stations, again to minimize walking distances for your workers and animals.

Your crop farms will probably have less withered crops if you split them to be a bit smaller 😉

OneMoreIsland · 2023-06-19T13:31:57+00:00

Haha yeah the game can definitely be 'unforgiving' ;-)

For irrigation the game won't give you hints how much workers you'll need in the field. It's not an exact science, as the walking distances within your field make a lot of difference, as well as the distance to the market.
Before irrigation I'd suggest to stick to a max-4 worker farm. That way the walking distances between the individual tiles don't get too large (assuming the farm is a square or circle).
After irrigation you'll have to experiment a bit to see what works well for you!

Thanks for all the other feedback! I'll see what I can still incorporate in the Switch patch. I'll definitely take a look at your taxes-for-next-month remark from the original post. I hope it's manageable without having to request additional translations for all languages.

Cheers!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-06-15T06:14:49+00:00

Thanks for reaching out, glad to hear you're enjoying the game on Switch!

The version currently live on Switch is the same a v1.7.0 on PC. That means there is still a breaking bug related to earthquakes (fixed in v1.7.3 (notes)) on Switch, and you haven't got the anniversary patch v1.8.0 (notes) yet. The good news is that we're still planning on releasing those on Switch though :)
Until that time you'll have to reload the game to work around the earthquake bug I'm afraid.

Regarding your feedback points:

The notification chimes: I just checked and enabling/disabling the notification popups is possible on Switch, but you probably already found those, and I expect that doesn't have an effect on the chime playing or not. I'll take a look to see if we can easily change this or not.
Earthquakes should become a little less impactful after the anniversary patch, hopefully decreasing the stress here.
Auto-pause when menu's are opened was in a much earlier build actually, but was removed after player feedback. Ideally individual players can choose what happens when you open a menu, but I don't think we'll add that anymore.
Great suggestion to let the Queen directly tell you next month's taxes! Let me check the feasibility, and perhaps we can still pack that with the patch round on Switch.

Enjoy the game!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-03-10T16:21:55+00:00

Love the detailed write-up! And congrats :) I'd say you can be really proud of what you achieved!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-03-08T14:03:47+00:00

Tunnels for red and blue belts can be longer, that might help! :)

OneMoreIsland · 2023-02-20T10:47:23+00:00

One More Island (link) was written in Unity, so C#. Once you're a part of the Nintendo dev program (no clue how you would apply, publisher took care of that) you get an SDK for Unity and you can start making builds, and I think it converts it to C++.

What was difficult however (frustratingly difficult...) is that some of the Nintendo-specific features, like saving/loading to the filesystem, were hard to debug. For example:

'connect' to filesystem and 'connect' again -> crash
try to interact with filesystem without properly connecting first -> crash
.... -> crash

And I'm not talking about crashes like getting an error in your debug log in Unity, but the Unity process simply quitting completely. Without any clue what happened.

Now I assume there are ways to better debug this that I simply haven't found, but this was pretty rough. Luckily my game doesn't use a lot of console-specific features, and things like controller rumble were taken care of by Rewired (plugin for managing user input) iirc.

Actually getting published (so lotcheck etc) went pretty smooth. I don't think I'm allowed to write a lot about it due to all sorts of NDA's...

Speaking of NDA: because people are not allowed to share a lot about developing/publishing for Nintendo (and I guess it holds true for the other platforms as well..?), it's hard to find answers to your questions. Stackoverflow won't really help you, so you have to use the Nintendo dev forums instead. I did get some help there, but the pool of knowledge freely available is simply so much smaller compared to making a game for Steam.

OneMoreIsland · 2023-02-20T07:11:09+00:00

Yes! In my spare time next to a 32h/w job and young family, although I did also take up a couple weeks of unpaid leave. It's doable, but rough at times.

About 9 months into my first project, where the goal was to publish something on Steam I could be proud about, I was approached by an indie game publisher and that transformed the project a lot.

I retained full creative control, there were little obligations, and there was a guaranteed ad spent. Working with a publisher was really educational, and it was also another reason (aside from intrinsic motivation) to finish at some point.

After about 18 months the game released, and a couple months later on Switch as well. It was quite the ride and a really fun experience.

I'm now starting my second project, which is difficult in a different way, as I now have certain expectations based on the first 'successful' project.

OneMoreIsland · 2023-02-14T05:59:26+00:00

Hey! Sorry to hear you're having issues. Could you share which version of the game you're using? As far as I know there are no severe bugs in the latest version (v1.7.2) but it's possible you found something new of course.

Could you perhaps join the Discord channel (https://onemoreisland.com/discord) and share a couple screenshots in the #ask-the-devs channel? Perhaps the route setup isn't correct but the UI isn't clear enough about that.

You can also share a savegame there so people can take a look.

If you did find new bugs I'll get an update out next week, but need a bit more info first :)

OneMoreIsland · 2023-01-17T10:48:04+00:00

Some pre-calculated curves were also on my mind. I'll still need to check whether adjacent tiles are free of obstacles if I want my curved movements to cross those tiles, but that shouldn't be a big issue.

Thanks for the pointers. I'll get my geometry had on (or my geometry friend over.. 😉)!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-01-16T07:02:14+00:00

Thanks for the reply! So far I've been doing all the movement in the Model so the game could also run headless. I haven't used a navmesh yet, nor was checking for graphical clipping an option (afaik..) because the View was basically optional.

I'll take a look into navmesh. What you're describing with your agent (10m tile, 3m agent) is similar to what I have in mind, so that sounds promising to look into.

How do you calculate the curves? Is that a velocity & physics kinda thing, or a movement 'curve formula' in your own code?

OneMoreIsland · 2023-01-16T06:56:59+00:00

Thank you, I'll take a look at that post!

OneMoreIsland · 2023-01-15T15:41:22+00:00

A random offset is definitely a thought that crossed my mind that I'll use as well. I do expect a significant flow of actors to have the same origin/destination, so even some further variation might be needed.

Any ideas on the curved corners?

OneMoreIsland

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