IIslands of War has finally left Early Access! Usually, these announcements will have loads of excitement and updates and news about the future of the game moving forward with cool updates. Sadly, this is not one of those games.
Some History
IIslands of War started as a fun project that I worked on as a university student. I seriously enjoyed my time developing this random idea about building floating islands in the sky and then blowing up other floating islands in the sky.
That was over 5 and a half years ago, and the game has been in Steam Early Access for almost exactly 4 years.
The Rewrite
However as I scoped more and more of the game, scope creep kicked in and I eventually decided that to move forward, I would need to rewrite basically the entire game to accommodate these new features. Check out some of the cool stuff I was working on:
Yeah thats right, I made an infinite grid so you could build islands of any size.
I wanted to have modules work more like a Tetris-like puzzle to try and optimize for.
Massive spikes and buildings are always cool!!
I also had plans for a story that would take you to different time lines and characters and pilots you could collect to give your island special abilities along the way and lore to go along with the strange world I was building! And monsters like giant floating whales and sky krakens and laser sharks!! And then a new map system with new ways of navigating the world with pirates that might raid you as you fast travelled and then you would have these really awesome high speed combat chases and stuff. And some out of game progression like a tech tree to unlock cooler weapons and items.
Boy did I have plans on plans...
Why did development stop?
You see, I was a pretty meh programmer back then and so the code was essentially a giant pile of spaghetti. With my final year university project in 2022 and now having a full time job in 2024, continuing development of this massive project has been burdensome and hasn't brought me any joy. So development has stopped, permanently.
The Future
As a result, IIslands of War is being taken out of Early Access, with no plans for any future development. I'm really sad about this, because I loved IIoW and poured so much into it, as the wonderful community that grew around the game. To everyone who has supported the game, thank you so much. I truly would have never gotten to this stage without you. While my time with IIoW may be over, I hope that my passion for making games never dies.
IIoW has had a great run. Thanks for playing, jwiggs
April Fools Event
The first year on Steam has flown by, and while updates have been slow lately, I couldn't skip this absolutely fantastic event from last year. The community came up with some wild suggestions, some of which were actually pretty good!
(This update is indeed buggy. I'm working on a hotfix)
Here are some of the most notable changes!
Wacky menu! Apologies for any induced nauseousness.
All cooldowns have been reduced by 3x! Health and shields have increased by 5x to offset this.
Tilted anyone? I really like this camera tilt, just maybe a less extreme version might get implemented in the game.
You gotta chase your loot now! Also be careful sometimes they transform into an evil loot bubble and start shooting you.
The portals also run away from you as well. But once they are fully charged, they stop, so you got to stop running too!
Air block? What is this sorcery? You can't CAN have a block of air! Explosions? Projectiles? They literally pass through like its not there. Ramming and collisions though? Well those still exist for some reason (I didn't think this through very well now did I)
There are also some other really fun changes, like insta exploding enemies. The in game news will have all the relevant details!
Enjoy!
P.S. This update actually contains a lot of the optimizations and behind the scenes that I have been working on since January, so hopefully the game runs faster and feels smoother. That being said, these optimizations haven't been exactly tested to their full extent, so the game may be a bit unstable.
April Fools 2021 Event Suggestions!
Starting last year, we the April Fools Event around this time of the year is a wacky and strange event where interdimensional forces (you) invade the game by suggesting random things that I can quickly patch into the game!
How can you suggest things?
There are a few different ways you can suggest changes:
1. Join the discord server! There is a special channel for suggestions under #youtube-suggestions. I will primarily be going through this channel and adding in the suggestions from there.
2. Watch the YouTube livestream! I will be livestreaming the crazy development of this event and if someone suggests something in the chat, I'll try and get to it! https://youtu.be/yg5QTHHr2Es
3. Comment on this event post with your suggestions! I will take a look through these before the livestream and might look at them at the end of development again, so the other two methods are probably more reliable to get me to see your suggestion.
There's no need to do all three of them, just one will be enough and I'll try my best to get through as many as possible! The key thing with the suggestions is that they have to be rather easy to implement.
Here are some of my favorite changes from last year:
Sky is bright pink
Islands are constructed upside down
Mortars fire downward and have upwards gravity
A massive random explosion will spawn every 5-10 minutes
Build area increased to 13x13. However, only visual changes were made to make it look like you have extra space. You still have a 12x12 build area.
Hit sounds changed to rubber duck squeaky noises
Excessive amounts screenshake
…just to name a few.
Some of the changes from last year were so good that they became a permanent feature, like the warp gates spinning!
Enjoy!
Enemies and Items Update
Overview
Enemies are the primary way you interact with the game and it has gotten rather stale. The purpose of this update was to overhaul the way enemies work and hopefully, create more fun gameplay as you shoot and blow them up.
In addition, this update has fixes for movement, RNG, and using every single item simultaneously.
New Items
Loads of new items that have explosions, slight gravity, cluster bombs, laser rays, flamethrowers, and more! Hold down right click when making a new game to launch yourself into sandbox mode and gain access to all the items!
Custom Enemies
Dark Order enemies no longer use the same items that you have access to and you cannot receive these items without creative mode, although there are plans to do so for another update.
Realm Bosses
With new items come special realm bosses that vary slightly each run. Realm bosses get a new type of weapon: colossal weapons! They are much larger than the normal weapons, and must be countered differently, forcing you to identify their weaknesses and swap up your playstyle!
Destruction Damage
Enemies can hurt you, even after they have been destroyed! Watch out for their core explosions and their falling islands!
Item Info Boxes
Colorful stat bars now give you a quick way to gauge the power of an item! For the number nerds, you can press shift to view the actual numbers as well.
The forge also has some cool animations for visualizing the changes in stats.
Island Stats
Like the item info boxes, but for your island! Quickly see an overview of the most important parts of your island.
Warp Mass
The game has struggled with balance for a few reasons, one of them being that you can place whatever you want on your island without restriction, leading to massive islands with extremely large amounts of firepower. While it's fun to blast your 30 cannons at the enemies, it gets boring really quick.
Warp mass, measured in quatta, limits the number of items you can place on your island. Every block uses 3 quatta and weapons start at 6 quatta and increases its quatta use as you level them up. If your island exceeds the limit, you will not be able to build your island in survival mode.
Other Changes
Forging an item to increase the tier increases its stats significantly
Forge percentages are now based on the current stats instead of the default stats
Forge minimum and maximum stat limits removed
Realm bosses always drop a movement item
Enemies health and damage scale for the different realms to create a balanced and challenging experience
Enemies can have modifiers to change their generation factors to have more weapons, armor, and shields, or blocks (among other things)
Enemies take up a certain amount of space to limit the number of powerful enemy islands that can spawn in a single region at a time
Enemies no longer lose their aggro on you, although moving too far away from them will cause them to deactivate (and do nothing)
Any enemy that is aggro'd on you will prevent you from editing your island, which prevents you from editing and rebuilding your island in the middle of a hostile region
Enemy movement and behavior has been radically improved simply simulate movement instead of actually using normal movement mechanics, allowing them to have greater control over their position
Added cool item properties like charge effects, allowing items to modify themselves as seen in the chainguns modifying their rate of fire.
New realm 9 boss!
Projectiles moved to their own data structure, allowing them to have tertiary or quaternary projectiles
Removed the laser trigger tech
Your island gets rebuilt when revisiting the editor
Major save file changes, both for players and enemies.
Console command to go into freecam
A bunch of other changes that are not as cool as these ones...
What's Next
GameMaker has released a new version with a lot of lit features in the past few months. I am going to be porting the game over to this new version as well as taking the time to clean up, document, and optimize parts of the game so that it runs better for everyone. I'm expecting this to take a week, but given my awful estimates on time, this could drag out for a month.
After that, I would like to improve some aspects of the UI and interactions with it, specifically the map, shop and forge. School is starting up again in September, and I'm hoping to finish these smaller changes before starting another longer update during the next school semester to be ready by Christmas!
If you want to get access to test versions of these updates, join the Discord server! We will also be having a massive faction war in there soon, with at least a hundred islands battling it out in a simulated environment!
Let me know what the next major update should be in the comments: Persistence Update, Enemies Update II, Environment Update, Drones Update, or something else entirely! I try and listen to the community as much as possible!
