- IIslands of War Released - 10 March 2024
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 y…
- April Fools Event - 1 April 2021
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…
- April Fools 2021 Event Suggestions! - 27 March 2021
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 reli…
- Enemies and Items Update - 24 July 2020
OverviewEnemies 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 ItemsLoads 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 EnemiesDark 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 BossesWith new items come special realm bosses that vary slightly each run. Realm bosses get a new type of weapon: colossal weapons!…
- April Fools Limited Time Event - 31 March 2020
What could have possibly gone wrong if I opened up suggestions for this April Fools Event to anyone in the Discord server? Turns out, it was a huuugee success and the game got some crazy changes just for fun! This event will be lasting till April 4th, and changes will be reverted back to normal. Warning: this version of the game contains rainbow colors and excessive screen shake. While there are no rapidly flashing images, it still may cause discomfort for those with photosensitive epilepsy. DevelopmentThe entire development of this update was livestreamed on Youtube. Check out the following links if you are interested! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qTddCfZbRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKqDmELi9kM Temporary Changes Warning, spoilers ahead. These changes will be reverted back to the normal once this event is over. Islands are constructed upside down Most item sprites have been f…
- Enemies Rework - Phase 1 - 27 March 2020
The biggest issue with the game is enemies. They all behave the same way and just end up being the same thing to the player: cannon fodder with no real strategy. This update is the first phase of a series of updates that will attempt to fix them. Enemy Changes BehaviorEnemy classes now have special behavior patterns created for them, depending on their type of class. Some classes circle around you, others like to poke in and out, and some like the bomber class just want to move up and down. These behaviors are modularly built so that I can easily create cool patterns from simple commands. GenerationWhile the island generation seemed alright for the most part, the classes themselves weren't incredibly balanced. In addition, sometimes enemies didn't spawn with weapons at all, so those issues were fixed as well. Balance Changes In an effort to make things more active and shooty, items have…
- Map Tweaks - 22 March 2020
This small update has a few changes and tweaks to the map. The idea of moving towards the center of the realm wasn't quite working as well as I intended. Most of the time regions on the opposite side of the gate region would be left untouched and were rather useless. So, I moved the gate region from the center of the map to opposite the starting region, hopefully allowing you to explore more and opening up more possibilities by increasing the distance between the where you start and where you need to go. Realmrealm gate spawn on the opposite side of the map from your starting region starting region is always a passage increased speed of the invasion so you need to be at the gate within 9 jumps (from 11) passage regions no longer spawn normally tweaked the distribution of the different region types Regionhostile regions descreased in size outpost regions (!) have 3-4 enemies blockade reg…
- Overhauled News Hub - 18 March 2020
What is the News HubThe news hub is a place where you can view the latest announcements like this one, or smaller patch notes. It is primarily so that I don't need to create a full Steam announcement for the small little changes I make, and also provides me with a way to give patch notes easily to those of you who are keen on testing newer unstable builds of the game (more on that later). The hub has been built to support Steam's markdown as much as possible so that I can quite literally copy and paste the announcements right over. If you are viewing this in the game, then you have probably already noticed the little notification you get when there is a new news message. Major announcements and changes will still be posted here on the Steam News, however smaller micro patches will just show up in the news hub. WhyOut of all the features I could have implemented first, why this one? Ther…
- Hello Steam! - 13 March 2020
GreetingsHello to everyone reading this post, and allow me to introduce myself. I am jwiggs, and am the sole developer of IIslands of War. I am currently a university student studying computer science, but have been making games ever since I was a kid. Making games has been a journey for me, and this one is no exception. In this post I will be talking about where the game has come from, where the game currently is, and what is in store for IIslands of War in the coming updates. The PastIn 2016, I participated in a small game jam with the entry Islands of War. Inspired by games like Minecraft and FTL, it was the start of what was to come. The game was simple, but slowly died as I lost interest in it. screenshots from the first game Fast forward 2 years later, to the summer of 2018. Once again, I entered a game jam and decided to go for round 2 with my initial idea and IIslands of War was…
