Islanders is a simple strategy puzzle game.
When you place a building you get points depending on surrounding objects. This lumberjack will give 10 points when it's placed, because there are 10 trees within its radius.
This quickly becomes more and more complicated, because buildings also interact with each other. The sawmill gets points for every lumberjack in its radius for example.
Whenever you reach enough points, you can choose which building you want to unlock and you get 6 new buildings. You lose when you run out of buildings.
Once your score is high enough, you can travel to the next island. All islands are proceduraly generated.
Our goal was capturing the feeling of a traditional builder game and packaging into a more condensed experience that's more accessible for beginners.
Islands have very different building conditions, which keeps the game challenging and interesting for a long time.
At the beginning of the project we did some research in the botanical garden to get some inspiration. Maybe this is where the islands came from?
As always analog prototyping was a great tool for inspiration as well.
One of our coaching sessions with our professors Susanne Brandhorst and Thomas Bremer as well as another student team.
During the development we got a ton of feedback from other students and our professors which turned out to be pretty helpful.
I came up with the buildings and did the balancing. There were a lot of factors to consider and it was a highly iterative process that required a lot of testing.
Here you can see the island generator in action. First the basic shape is created. Then more and more detail is added.
Due to good time management, we even managed to finish the game settings within our 4 month time frame.
The final result is an elegant and simplistic builder game with a lot of depth and replayability.
