ISLAND (2024)(Commodore 64)
A downloadable game
This game was originally developed by Eleanor Rice and Dr. C. F. Cannon, published in 1983 by The Guild Adventure Software, then re-published by Micro Application S.A. in 1985. This release prompted various translations like French, Polish and Hungarian. Jump to 2024, when upon discovering the benefits of BASIC compilers, me and fellow BASIC enthusiast István Maros remade the game with a few extras, most importantly joystick controls.
ISLAND is a turn based survival game. You're stuck on an island with limited supplies of water and food, and your hope is to either be picked up by a ship or to collect enough planks to build a raft yourself while trying not to die of various dangers. Your time is limited though, as a deadly hurricane is about to wipe everything off the island in a month.
Download
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I collected 7 planks in 29 days, I think more is impossible. Would that be enough for a raft? On the 30th day, the hurricane came.
Another time, on the 11th day, pirates found the bottle. What bad luck..
However, there was also a time when a large ship found it on the second day and I was saved.
Oh, and the game cheats on fishing. Sometimes it shifts the whole line to the left or right to make it even more difficult to guess the correct numbers.
You need ten planks for a raft, and I think it is possible but you have to deal with the risk of being more daring with the sharks. The 1-to-9 positions in fishing are fixed and I made no effort at changing it, however I restored an original feature of the game that was missing from the 1985 version: the fishes now swim at different depths so even though the game doesn't really try to deceive you, your perception of left-right is thrown off a bit by the small difference of depth.