The Islander - a game

I have almost 800 hours in Stardew Valley. Seriously. It's my "I'm too medicated and/or depressed to do anything else" game.

However, I also have over a dozen savefiles, because the fun of the first year gets tedious so quickly as soon as the money starts rolling in. So for a couple of years, I've been thinking about the kind of "farming" "chill" game I'd make, and it has somehow congealed into an actual concept that I call - The Islander. It's a very vague reference to the Nightwish song I guess.

The premise is simple - the player character wakes on a shore after what looks like a shipwreck. They have no memory of what happened - nor of who they are or what their life was before they awoke. This allows the player to give the character whatever look, name, and gender (or lack thereof) they prefer. They are greeted by a jovial older man who reveals himself as the de facto mayor of the town of Heavencliff, the only village on this island.

And also reveals that the amnesia the player character is experiencing is what happened to all other villagers, who all arrived to the island after a shipwreck as well, and have all decided to take it as a chance to start a new life from scratch. 

Also because, he mentions, you cannot leave the island - even if you knew where to go. Some sort of force keeps boats from leaving the surrounding waters, and in fact keeps anybody from coming unless they are thrown onto the shore by a distant storm.

Mysterious. But you're hungry and tired, and the mayor mentions that luckily, there is one house free at the moment you can stay in - the village's farm, that has been inhabited for a few years.

And so the player character begins their new life in Heavencliff, a quirky and peaceful village that welcomes them in its community with open arms. Learns how to farm and forage the odd, not-quite-what-they-should-be flora and fauna of the island, gets to know the rest of the villagers, and begins to experiment with the Island's mix of technology and magic.

And quickly discovers that even if they appear to have free roam of the entire island, there is somewhere in the forest behind their farm where they're not supposed to go....and something different, perhaps sinister at work behind the shadows of the trees and the things the villagers aren't willing to talk about....

As said at the start a big part of the ideas and mechanics I've put into this project comes from my frustration with other games that should be down my alley but are always missing something - they're too straight, too simple, have too much redundant variety, and largely fall into the kind of games you stop playing because you're bored of it, and not because the story is over. So there will be an underlying storyline, and characters the player will hopefully want to know better because they're interesting and not for a completion percentage...

I have thought a lot about how I want to make this game happen, and while game maker for a while seemed the best option, I have been considering getting into Unity - if only because the typical "farming sim" style is pixel art...and as much as I love pixel art, I have ideas about the visual design of this project that would be fun to develop in a different way. Sort of a mix of lush tropical vegetation reclaiming concrete and steel; as if magic had swept away an abandoned island like Gunkanjima...

In the next posts I'll do a writeup of the mechanics of the game, and then perhaps...start introducing the characters! Thank you for reading and your support! I really want to make this happen and I hope this patreon will be the kind of motivator I need to keep at it!