The Inner Island
Description
This is a recreation of the calming mental retreat that I created for myself through meditation, where I could escape depression, gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia. I wanted to share it so that it might bring you some peace and meditative sanctuary, too. I made this game as part of a 1-week challenge. It's a simple experience where you collect books full of notes that I have left for you on a pleasant island. The notes are delivered through simple voiceovers by myself.
Play time: 10-15 minutes (or as long as you want).
Requirements: Keyboard & mouse (or laptop touchpad), audio. Touchscreen not currently supported due to the time the game was made in.
Recommended: You can play this game in your internet browser by pressing the "Run relaxation experience" button above, however, you'll have a better experience if you download the game and play it that way. Just click the download at the bottom of this page, find it in your downloads and extract it, open the folder called "The Inner Island", and then double click the file called "The Inner Island". I recommend headphones!
How to play
Look with the mouse and move around with the WASD keys. The only interactivity required is left clicking with the mouse.
I know the quality of the game could be higher, but I committed to only allocating a little more than a week to this, from start to finish, and so I learned a huge amount across numerous areas of development (my only prior experience with Unity is really just user interface). The purpose was not to make the highest possible polish product, but to actually *finish* working on it in a tight timeframe and then distribute it.
I apologise for a lack of accessibility options, but in a 1-week process there wasn't any time. I may continue to work on this and make it more accessible for the future :)
You can follow me through my website and follow along as I start creating a fantastical narrative adventure fantasy game inspired by my life as a trans person! I'm kicking that progress off in 2024, starting with the writing of a script.
SFX by:
KangarooVindaloo, InspectorJ, soundbytez, Luftrum, thepaganpanda.
Unity assets by:
Digital Ruby, StormBringer Studios, day9, forst, Blue Polygon, Robot Skeleton, VIS Games, Deep Field Development, Vefects, KrakenXR, E6 Model, Aedan Graves, BG Studio, Nox_Sound, Piloto Studio, 3DeLucas, VIVID Arts, ice_screen, laxer.
Music by Savfk.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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Short and nice walk through a little island.
As advertised I hope 😄 thanks for the review!
Thank you so much for sharing this with the world.
I loved it, amazing effort for just 1 week. was so peaceful and relaxing.
if you ever do get the time to work on it a little bit more, right at the end I made the mistake of stepping on the platform while listening to the last book and both voice lines started to play at once so having some form of check that there is not currently a voice being played before playing the next one would be nice. might have just been my laptop as it was being a little slow about even launching it and it was running super hot but I did fined that the draw distance could have been bigger because from the top I could not see down to the forest or beach.
all in all though it was an amazing experience and super well put together especially considering the time frame
Thanks so much for reviewing it! Thanks for pointing out the voice overlaps, I'd identified it, but I temporarily ignored it to try and comply with the challenge of starting, working, and finishing in a short time. I think it's important for me to get comfortable with putting things out into the world even when they aren't as ready as I want them to be, just for the act of doing ten things amateurishly rather than one thing perfectly. I learnt SO MUCH from doing this one project to the most basic level, I'm excited for what I'll learn each time.
The draw distance was limited actually for purely aesthetic reasons down on the beach, so that you can't see the woods until you walk nearer to them, but I could contextually modify the fog distance so that visibility increases, which is a good idea!