Uncharted Wanders
Journey across the perilous Divide between the Spiritual and Physical Realms. For profit, of course.
Did you ever wonder: "What if Uncharted Waters was a dungeon crawler?" I know I sure did!
Average play time (if you get hooked and play all the way to the end): 90 minutes
Time to see a representative sampling of the game (I'd suggest: visited another town and then returned, and found at least one secret passage to bypass some fights along the way): about 15 minutes
Features:
- 6 towns across two realms!
- 14 Trade Goods to buy, sell, and profit with!
- 4 key items to collect to win the game
- Optional final side-boss for your mercenaries to fight
Hints:
- The combat along the first path you take is rather difficult, try finding a way through with 0 or 1 fights (and, if you get really unlucky and your mercenary dies, just reload and try again ^_^).
- Except for a few later areas, almost all combat is avoidable, though at some point it's optimal not to.
- Double tap a movement direction to sprint.
- Access music volume and game saving in the Esc menu.
Controls should be mostly self-explanatory, but here are some alternatives not shown in-game:
- All: Toggle which buttons turn vs strafe in the Esc menu.
- Keyboard: Space to accept menu options, Numpad, Arrows to navigate on-screen and in-world. M for Map. Shift-click to sell/buy max, or speed up combat.
- Gamepad: Bumpers to strafe. Trigger to sell/buy max, or speed up combat. Y for Inventory. Back/Select for Map. Start for menu.
- Mouse: Also works, if you like that kind of thing
- Touch-screen/mobile: Should work great! Not much testing on that front though =)
Post-jam updates:
- Fix crash playing in itch.io app (apparently it doesn't support HTML5 Audio?!)
- Fix combat bug where you could sometimes get a game over while opening a chest
- Fix display bug on high score list
- Minor changes to initial tutorial text / hints
- Original jam version playable here
Credits:
- Programming and design by Jimb Esser
- Music and Sound effects by Alex Hamadey
- Some original art by Jimb Esser and Nick Duguid - Special thanks to Nick for jumping in at the last minute to do some pixel pushing after the other artists abandoned the project!
- Some brainstorming / game design contributions by Marssoup
- Built using the custom engine GLOV.js - #crawler branch (MIT Licensed)
- Game source code available on GitHub (note: no license provided, all rights reserved by the original authors, just available for informational purposes)
- Lots of environment art and most of the character sprites from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup / Project Utumno / Rtiles (CC0)
- Some art purchased from Tiny Tales Dungeon Tiles pack by Rayane Félix / Megatiles
- Some art purchased from Iconic Interiors pack by https://twitter.com/SelieltheShaper
- Some icons derived from work by Aleksandr Makarov @IknowKingRabbit
- Font Celtic Times and 04b03
- Dawnbringer-32 color palette (use occasionally)
Comments
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Any chance of a downloadable version?
If you install the Itch.io app, you should be able to download and play the game offline. Let me know if it doesn't work, but it's worked on my previous projects, so should work on this one too!
Really enjoyed the little bit of this that I have played so far.
Wonderful work! I'm a big fan of Uncharted Waters and Stone Soup. I saw the name and thought, 'nah, probably not what it sounds like'. Glad I was wrong. Gozag approves heartily!
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the kind words!
I have been looking for this game for the past 3 years. O. M. G. This game was made for me. I can't stop playing it 😭 Last night I sat playing for 8 hours straight I just couldn't stop 😭 Goodbye life, I shall retreat into my heavenly uncharted wanders for the rest of time. I'm a happy girl now.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS GAME 💖💖💖💖💞🫶🍀
Thank you so much for you kind words, and I'm glad you enjoyed it so much =).
hello anyone?
Umm... hello?
hi
So PC Gamer magazine recently featured your game in their "Free Game Reviews" section (August 2023 #372). Who doesn't love a free game?
I spent a few hours over the last 2 days making my way to the very end while searching out every treasure and secret passage (I hope).
Great game. I loved the retro style, the trading and hired mercenaries, the quest list, and especially the exploring. The mild hints were perfect. Hand holding is far too common in games these days! The Hall of Fame is a nice touch. I really liked the ending.
I had a little trouble with a certain quest but finally tracked down the reference and made the delivery.
While it is 'game jam short' in length, I think it checks all the boxes for me. A longer version could include more towns, more tricky quests and more map puzzles but that wouldn't necessarily make it any better.
Also, while the game is browser based, after starting the game I saved a copy of the browser page (complete). I opened the downloaded copy in a browser that doesn't clear my cookies/cache on exit (I use Chrome for this purpose) and it works fine offline and maintains my save file. The 'Hall of Fame' won't display when offline of course.
Thank you for the entertainment!
Wow, thanks for letting me know it landed there, that's awesome! Glad you enjoyed it and thanks for your support!
Fun data time from looking at the high score list for _Uncharted Wanders_, as of the end of the jam rating period!
• 94 people played long enough to get any money at all.
• Of the people who only managed to sell their keepsake (21), the quickest was 21 seconds, the slowest was 4 minutes, clearly there was some discoverability issue with the bootstrapping process and selling items in the shop =). Also note the high score only gets submitted when the net worth or victory progress goes up, so these people may very well have managed to buy goods, make it out of town, and then die in The Divide, not actually just gave up immediately. However, another 16 people managed to do the one super trivial quest in the starting town (and nothing else), so those 21 didn't even do that.
• 32 people rated the game on Itch, a lot of the other plays probably came from other communities I shared it in
• Median playtime of submitted scores was 400 seconds (~7 minutes, though they may have played longer but just not made any progress)
• Median playtime of those who beat the game (21 people) was 100 minutes. Quickest victory was by possessedcow in just under an hour. Slowest victories (excluding an outlier likely from being AFK...) were around 3 hours! I hope they were having fun.
• Highest net worth currently goes to Maddie , who accumulated approximately 6 times as much as the most frugal player (Yurga) to win. Hoarding money is fun, I understand.
• All but the one most efficient player who won had more than double the amount of money actually needed to win, a good sign people were getting engaged (or lost!).
Special thanks to everyone who played, and added your name to your score, it's nice to know who the weirdos are ;).
Do you have plans to expand this title? It really has the makings of something bigger. I will follow to check on you, i hope to see bigger, even commercial version of this;)
No current plans, though I might try to combine some of the mechanics that worked into a commercial product in the future. I'll definitely let people know if that ever happens ;).
Really enjoyed this, wouldn't mind having a downloadable version of this even if it costs a bit.
Glad you enjoyed it! Sorry, it's all just web tech, so no downloadable version easily available - you could clone the GitHub repo and install and run the development server through Node.js if you really wanted to, but that's about it ^_^. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to wrap it all in Electron or something...
It seems the itch.io app allows you a "download" version, and I've worked around the issues getting it to run there now, so you can install it that way ^_^.
That is cool, worked splendidly and also helps with other browser-only games.
Cool, thanks for your support!
This is a really nice game, love it !