Hey guys, it's been a moment. I've been hard at work over the last couple of months, even taking time away from my main job to further the work on Tiny Atolls.
I took quite a few weeks to break the main concept down into something simpler and more "fun" and something I can relate to myself. The old gameplay was too puzzley and childish, with the color mechanic and an absurd recursion of tile placement.
The New Core Gameplay
In the future, the new gameplay will resemble more of flash games like "Little Alchemy" and "Islanders". I'm keeping a lot of the mechanics, such as hex-tiles and the idea of placing shapes of tiles to generate complex buildings with special effects.
I’m changing the way the player places tiles in the world and you can now place any tiles you have in any order you wish, and those tiles can be combined inside the UI itself to create more specialized tiles that shape the island in different ways.
For instance, you can merge 2 "Flower" tiles to create a "Tree" tile, giving you new shapes to explore and new combinations in the world to interact with.
Preview Branch
I just released a preview branch that you can access via the beta tab on Steam, so you can get a very VERY rough preview of what the new gameplay looks like.
The reason the game now has 2 different branches is:
I need some people to test the new gameplay to give me feedback on it, so I can provide quick updates and further refine it.
I do not want to delete the original version of the game just yet, as I believe that even with its flaws and bugs, it is still a more playable and enjoyable experience than the current state of my reforged project. It will be replaced in a few months once the new gameplay is on its feet.
Warning to those who want to try out the new gameplay: There is no save/load feature, no multi-language support, and the gameplay loop is very tiny and it will simply let you know when you’ve won the game with a game over screen.
Some words from me
So yeah, that’s that. It took tremendous work and mental resilience for me to push through the mud of what is there and what could be, to have the game in a pretty good place. I'm very confident in the new gameplay loop of Tiny Atolls.
Yet again, I want to reiterate what I said in the last update post. I've seen some Steam reviews where people didn’t really understand what this game is about, and that's fine but it's possible I’m not making it clear enough: I am not making this game for money anymore, even though that was the original purpose when I had a team working on it. It has become something else now; something to flourish and finish in a satisfying manner.
That means there are no real deadlines for the completion of this project anymore, as updates can only be delivered sporadically, but consistently.
I hope you understand the reasons I'm shifting the gameplay and it's to realistically be able to finish it on my own. I thank every one of you who has been supporting the project, and I hope to be able to bring you the new update to the main branch very soon!
Cheers