Love the idea, love the atmosphere, love the execution. It feels puzzley and fresh, something that I've been looking for recently.
Currently looking to get into game design as a hobby. Any suggestions on where to start? Perhaps this isn't the appropriate place to post this. If so I will delete if able. I have experience in many programming languages, but am a bit of a script kiddie. I'm just a former programmer with a ton of ideas.
If I can help you out with anything as well let me know and I will see if I can help.
Not really a game designer myself, but one thing I've heard is to make a bunch of really small game projects, rapidly trying out ideas without over-investing in them. You might stumble onto something interesting, and then you can expand it if you think it'll be worthwhile. I hear game jams are good for this, and IIRC, the first version of Terra Nil was created during one.
This is really great info!! Thanks a bunch for the reply. I have been looking to physical card and board games as a means to understand what it means to "find the fun" when it comes to game design, it's not as obvious as it is when I'm trying to learn a new programming language. I have been eyeing some game jams for a while and I need to make time to actually join one because I hear many people say how much great experience those are. Thanks again!!
I think if you're coming at it from a programming background, you might (based on my observations of others) have a tendency to be in love with how smart a system is, how clean a back-end, how "clever" a technical solution was, even though none of these might be things that a player actually experiences. If you're really interested in game design, it would likely be helpful to keep circling back to what has the largest effects on a player's experience. Sometimes a technical solution is very much needed, but often it's not (at least not to test out whether your game idea's any good). If you ever take a game further than a jam, it's likely you'll want to do it over, better, anyway, so spending more time on exploring an idea and less time on techie stuff is usually best bang-for-time-spent.
That said, if you're doing it as a hobby, then just do what you enjoy! I'd suggest still trying to make things with the intention of showing your friends and having them play them, and keeping your projects small, but if what you're doing and what you're learning brings you joy, then keep going! And if you're not enjoying it any more, then find something else that excites you. :)
This is more accurate than I would like to admit! I do find the transition from programming to "game design" to be a difficult one. Some things I can make, but I just don't find fun afterwards. I'm mostly doing this as a hobby and will continue to dabble in things. Thanks so much for the insightful response!!!
Wonderful game, I had no idea a city builder could be this.
It'd be cool to be able to undo back to the start of a phase.
Minor complaint is that the end can be really tough if you don't have enough to do the atmosphere from the get-go. Reclaiming things that create your river network takes away the rivers and makes it very difficult to cash in.
I'm not sure if this makes sense from a gameplay perspective but I want to be able to keep windmills/water pumps around to maintain river networks while deconstructing other things in phase III. I don't personally think finding places to place pylons that don't mess up your river network is a fun sort of challenge. If keeping my river network around were easier, I could see myself using more ports instead of trying to rush straight to the drone.
Rushing for fixing the weather system is currently optimal, for good or for ill, although the ports are fun to use. If you aren't worried financially, you can just rebuild the power and water pump if you accidentally recycle them.
I think it would be nice if there were a couple of percent wiggle room in the goals. It's really frustrating to come within 1% of the goal and then spend almost 1500 trying to achieve that 1% with no success. Just how do you get rid of wetlands once their created?
Sorry about this, not really sure how we'd detect wiggle room because then people would want wiggle room for the wiggle room. But I take your point, we'll think about it!
When zen mode is implemented, it should allow unlimited undos. The chain of dependency for getting certain buildings in certain areas means that if you messed up, it probably wasn't just one turn ago.
I feel like I must be missing something because Highlands is extraordinarily difficult... there's a tremendous number of things to balance when trying to plan ahead, not a lot of options for what you can actually do at any given time, and all it takes is one bad placement more than one turn ago to make the game unwinnable. I've gone at it about 10 times now and have only gotten to the third "phase" twice, compared to Floodplain, which I barely knew what I was doing on and still passed without a great struggle the first time I got to the second phase.
I had the exact same feeling with the final map, but not that one. Odd.
Out of curiosity, are you trying to plan ahead between the first and second stages, like putting greenhouses where it'll benefit the second stage? I personally can't do that, and I'm not sure it's necessary, but it vaguely sounds like you're trying to?
I'd be curious to see what your approach is, although it's hard to explain over text. Good luck, though! It's definitely doable!
I'm 20+ tries in and only seem to be doing worse the more effort I put in, I can't even get to phase 2 anymore. I'm placing scrubbers and greenhouses to minimize both gaps and overlap and attempting to expand the river network so I can get power to the lowest level, which costs 350 (excavator --> calcifier --> wind turbine) for what feels like every two inches of river. I reset the map to make sure there IS an initial river system (have seen a few maps where it seemingly fails to generate), that the river actually connects up, and that there's a decent distribution of stone across the top two levels, but there seems to be a hard limit of one stone patch on the lowest level, and because of that it's not possible to hold out for phase 2's cheaper buildings before building more than one or two excavators.
The part that drives me insane is that I don't see many different ways to proceed on any given map. The top two levels are basically the same every time and sometimes I finish it with more money than I started with, but because of how expensive it is to get power around the bottom that money just evaporates in fewer turns than I can make it back. It's hard to feel like the majority of maps Highlands generates are even winnable.
Ouch. Well, I'm not sure what we're doing differently, precisely... you shouldn't need more than one or two Excavators? It's fine to have to build some, and it's not worth wasting your total coverage to delay building Excavators; due to order of operations, you need to build them before Scrubbers, and you'll probably need one, so you might want to build one with the initial starting budget.
I personally delay building greenhouses as late as possible, waiting until the verge of bankruptcy, and only in places where I won't build more scrubbers. I feel like that helps with getting the most out of greenhouse placement. Fun fact, if you have a single wind turbine in the middle of nowhere, the best coverage is to place 4 scrubbers above, below, left and right of it, then 3 greenhouses (1 line and 2 L pieces).
Otherwise, well, the game's hard to put into words. I recorded a video if it'll help. Although, maybe it's a puzzle you'd rather solve yourself? Up to you if you want to watch it! (Still uploading at the moment of writing.)
Played the first two maps without realizing A) I could pan around to see the whole area, and B) I could change the shape of the greenhouses. So glad I read this comment. That's what happens when you don't read the controls, I guess!
This game is an absolute breath of fresh air. Once I finish it I'm going to go back and play the original jam version to see how it all started.
There is a bug on the 3rd "area" (it might be the 4th), I am to add biodiversity but I can only see buildings to make 3 biomes, the swamp biome building is missing and the third 'tab' doesn't show up which is where that building is located. I'm on my 9th run and I've ran into this bug multiple times rendering the level impassable
Hey there, really sorry about this, it seems to be a problem with the undo/saving system :( From what I understand if you can beat it without any saving and loading it should work. If you really want to just skip it, pop me a message on twitter or email and I'll tell you some dev hacks :P
Very cool game! Love it. Nice and peaceful playing at my own paste :) very nice! There was no tutorial or anything but i got the idea fast enough how it works and was partly the fun really! But maybe some tips here and there would have been helpful or to clear up why i can only build one windmill onto the “rock building” instead of more then one.
I would love to get feedback on my game so if you have time please look at my sim city like puzzle game: https://guldor.itch.io/citybuilder
No idea if you want feedback but here we are… The currency of the game was not very clear to me, i did not know when i would run out of gain anything and completly misted the currency to begin with. It feels a bit outside of the game. like there is mysterious money. Not sure if currency is needed at all just building and trying to get the best version(without making mistakes) could be enough. Also i had trouble placing buildings on the bottom since the UI was in the way. An other thing i would love to see is that after building you can build the same building again instead of having to click on the icon again.
Overall very cool! Love it and want to play it again!
I think I found a bug. Cleared all buildings on the peninsula but somehow stuck on 64%. I used the destruction pylon to hover over the entire map but it didn't seem like I missed anything.
this game is incredible good! It's totally different from a city building game, art is awesome and gameplay is so much interesting and relaxing! Loved it!
I had to dial it down to easy because I'm terrible, but what a relaxing time. Solving puzzles and making a beautiful landscape you leave behind on your way to parts unknown.
hell yeah! i remember the game from ludum dare, the progress is amazing :D i liked playing it then and love it right now :D cant wait what next updates will bring
I bought this game a couple of days ago, and I've already spent a number of hours on it. I was so delighted that first time I put a greenhouse down and got that burst of green coins. Such a cute game that rewards you all along the way. I really needed something environmentally positive. :D
I love the idea and would love to be able to play it, but it doesn't show up properly on an ultra-wide monitor. There's no screen resolution settings, and it looks like the vertical height of screen elements is based on the width of the screen - so everything runs off the top of the screen.
Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.
(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)
e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080
Thanks! It looks like the width and height are switched in the command below, but it worked. (FYI - it'll still use the previous full screen/windowed setting, but Alt+Enter toggles that fine).
I knew there must be some way to make Unity use a particular resolution, but was not finding how for the life of me.
I liked the vibe of this game, and the learning curve was hard enough but not too steep. It turned out to be a puzzle game more than a resource/automation management game - I got some happiness when that light bulb when on for me.
After I figured the basics out, though, I didn't see much reason to continue. It needs a little more complexity or new challenges to keep me coming back.
This game is fantastic! I especially love to watch the scene once the game is won and all the machinery is cleaned up. Are there any plans to allow revisiting previous maps? Perhaps combined with a high score system where clicking the score would load the reclaimed map.
At first it looks way to easy, but when playing it is atleast a bit of a challange (played only first two stages). I think there is enough challange in this game, and im intressted in to where it wil go.
One thing: The mainmenu GUI is not working properly on my 21:9 aspect ratio. No problem in the game itself, so not realy important. But a GUI scale option would be nice.
Really enjoying this game, it's a twist on the usual "city-building" simulator and creating a landscape is really satisfying.
A couple of queries: I noticed that the waterways dry-up when the pumps are recycled which seems a shame and surely impacts on delivery and transport of the recycled equipment to the rocketship. Is there any way to prevent this?
I've hit another stumbling block - on the "mountain" stage (the third one) I can't seem to raise the biomes percentage over 29% (40% is needed to advance) even though they're clearly covering over half the map and all three biomes I can build have a tick on their creators.
There's a bug on the mountain stage where the game wants you to make wetland. There is not supposed to be any wetland on the mountain stage. Sorry about that, the only fix I've found so far is to restart the map :(
Ah, okay. Hopefully that'll get ironed out in a future update (I know it's still in development). Am enjoying the game a lot, so can live with re-starting the map. :)
Playing it again, it seems that when you quit to the menu then continue the saved game, it changes from three biomes to four, so the issue seems to be with loading saved games.
I was really enjoying this game, up until the mountain level. I don't know if I'm just being stupid or what, but there just aren't ever enough trees to create all the flower fields required.
I struggled with this too! After only just beating it, vfqd told me about a strategy that makes it significantly easier. I don't want to spoil it for you if you want to figure it out for yourself though!
You only need a small piece of fynbos to start a fire, so if you plan your excavators so that they either just cut off one tree, or that a tree creates fynbos across a river, you can use that little piece as a firestarter for forests while keeping all of the rest of the fynbos for biodiversity.
This way you're not using up the existing trees for forests, and any new trees that you get from the Arboretum can also potentially be used for beehives.
Another possible approach I've found to work is to leave unscrubbed wasteland around the edge of the tiles that will become forest, then build new scrubbers/greenhouses on the margin around the forest after the placing the arboretums. You need to plan ahead a little to make sure you can actually get power to those parts but otherwise its quite simple and can give quite a lot of tiles for fynbos.
Found this while exploring itch.io, I love it, really calm an relaxing, ultra light and really adictive, beautifull pixelart an art style, i´m just on stage 2, but it really catched me up
The UI is broken on ultra-wide screen (3440x1440) for the panel where you choose terrain in main menu. Top bit of it is not visible as it is off screen. The "Welcome to Terra Nil" has the "0% of 50%" circle over the text, again probably cause of the alignment. Popup/tooltip for the bottom-left circle, again off-screen.
You need to test the game against ultra-wide. In Unity you can add new resolutions to test in the aspect ratio drop-down in game view.
More and more people have access to these kinds of resolutions so you need to either add support for it or you need to lock the game res to aspect ratios you designed for so that we have black borders on sides when game will not work well on ultra-wide.
Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.
(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)
e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080
think the game has softlocked because I'm at stage 3, and the game says I'm 65% of the way through recycling... but there's absolutely nothing left. At all.
Not sure if you're aware of this, but when you try to launch the game on Windows 10 it throws a Windows Smart Screen error and tries to prevent you from launching the game. I've done a bit of research after encountering this error before, and it's apparently a problem with Unity games that have a custom icon. For some reason Windows flags the icon as a security risk.
waterpumps are a bit glitchy when you use the undo button, i've watched my riverbeds fill up more than they ought to be after an undo before.
adore the game. i wish there was an option to start from latter stages of restoration when replaying a level - with like, maybe suboptimal map states for balance? i've been stuck on mountain for ages and am considering going back to floodplain baby land so that i can see all the charming animals again.
This is a wonderful game, the most incisive take on builder mechanics I've seen. A few bits of feedback, most of which echo things other players have said:
* Resource-based failure detection has a pretty reliable false positive when building a greenhouse near 0 that nets you enough to keep playing. See attached screenshot below.
* I'm finding I often run out of trees before I reach the pollination goal in phase 2, and the game doesn't offer any guidance as to how I can build in this or the prior phase to avoid this. All the other mechanics offer pretty clear built-in learning experiences like, "arrange your rivers and wetlands carefully to contain fires", whereas I don't really know what I can do to earn myself some breathing room for the tree+bees goal. It's possible I'm missing some point of strategy here though.
* The "continue" button on the game failure dialog doesn't seem to do anything.
* The "exit" button should ask for confirmation, and/or its caption should be amended to clarify that it means exiting the game entirely.
Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you're enjoying the game! I've interestingly found beehives to be the easiest in testing. Maybe for the purposes of your playthrough, try placing them before doing a burn or the hydroponiums. But in a more general sense, I'll think about your feedback and how I can incorporate it, thanks!
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Love the idea, love the atmosphere, love the execution. It feels puzzley and fresh, something that I've been looking for recently.
Currently looking to get into game design as a hobby. Any suggestions on where to start? Perhaps this isn't the appropriate place to post this. If so I will delete if able. I have experience in many programming languages, but am a bit of a script kiddie. I'm just a former programmer with a ton of ideas.
If I can help you out with anything as well let me know and I will see if I can help.
Not really a game designer myself, but one thing I've heard is to make a bunch of really small game projects, rapidly trying out ideas without over-investing in them. You might stumble onto something interesting, and then you can expand it if you think it'll be worthwhile. I hear game jams are good for this, and IIRC, the first version of Terra Nil was created during one.
This is really great info!! Thanks a bunch for the reply. I have been looking to physical card and board games as a means to understand what it means to "find the fun" when it comes to game design, it's not as obvious as it is when I'm trying to learn a new programming language. I have been eyeing some game jams for a while and I need to make time to actually join one because I hear many people say how much great experience those are. Thanks again!!
@ChaosFarseer's absolutely right! :)
I think if you're coming at it from a programming background, you might (based on my observations of others) have a tendency to be in love with how smart a system is, how clean a back-end, how "clever" a technical solution was, even though none of these might be things that a player actually experiences. If you're really interested in game design, it would likely be helpful to keep circling back to what has the largest effects on a player's experience. Sometimes a technical solution is very much needed, but often it's not (at least not to test out whether your game idea's any good). If you ever take a game further than a jam, it's likely you'll want to do it over, better, anyway, so spending more time on exploring an idea and less time on techie stuff is usually best bang-for-time-spent.
That said, if you're doing it as a hobby, then just do what you enjoy! I'd suggest still trying to make things with the intention of showing your friends and having them play them, and keeping your projects small, but if what you're doing and what you're learning brings you joy, then keep going! And if you're not enjoying it any more, then find something else that excites you. :)
This is more accurate than I would like to admit! I do find the transition from programming to "game design" to be a difficult one. Some things I can make, but I just don't find fun afterwards. I'm mostly doing this as a hobby and will continue to dabble in things. Thanks so much for the insightful response!!!
Yup, seconded :)
I love it! Much room for improvement but this is a great base. Are you planning on doing more with this game or leave it as is?
We're working on it every day!
Wonderful game, I had no idea a city builder could be this.
It'd be cool to be able to undo back to the start of a phase.
Minor complaint is that the end can be really tough if you don't have enough to do the atmosphere from the get-go. Reclaiming things that create your river network takes away the rivers and makes it very difficult to cash in.
I'm not sure if this makes sense from a gameplay perspective but I want to be able to keep windmills/water pumps around to maintain river networks while deconstructing other things in phase III. I don't personally think finding places to place pylons that don't mess up your river network is a fun sort of challenge. If keeping my river network around were easier, I could see myself using more ports instead of trying to rush straight to the drone.
Rushing for fixing the weather system is currently optimal, for good or for ill, although the ports are fun to use. If you aren't worried financially, you can just rebuild the power and water pump if you accidentally recycle them.
Thank you, and thanks for the feedback :)
I think it would be nice if there were a couple of percent wiggle room in the goals. It's really frustrating to come within 1% of the goal and then spend almost 1500 trying to achieve that 1% with no success. Just how do you get rid of wetlands once their created?
Huh... I guess you can't replace wetlands? Hmm. Out of curiosity, what were you doing when you wanted to replace some wetlands?
Sorry about this, not really sure how we'd detect wiggle room because then people would want wiggle room for the wiggle room. But I take your point, we'll think about it!
When zen mode is implemented, it should allow unlimited undos. The chain of dependency for getting certain buildings in certain areas means that if you messed up, it probably wasn't just one turn ago.
I feel like I must be missing something because Highlands is extraordinarily difficult... there's a tremendous number of things to balance when trying to plan ahead, not a lot of options for what you can actually do at any given time, and all it takes is one bad placement more than one turn ago to make the game unwinnable. I've gone at it about 10 times now and have only gotten to the third "phase" twice, compared to Floodplain, which I barely knew what I was doing on and still passed without a great struggle the first time I got to the second phase.
I had the exact same feeling with the final map, but not that one. Odd.
Out of curiosity, are you trying to plan ahead between the first and second stages, like putting greenhouses where it'll benefit the second stage? I personally can't do that, and I'm not sure it's necessary, but it vaguely sounds like you're trying to?
I'd be curious to see what your approach is, although it's hard to explain over text. Good luck, though! It's definitely doable!
I'm 20+ tries in and only seem to be doing worse the more effort I put in, I can't even get to phase 2 anymore. I'm placing scrubbers and greenhouses to minimize both gaps and overlap and attempting to expand the river network so I can get power to the lowest level, which costs 350 (excavator --> calcifier --> wind turbine) for what feels like every two inches of river. I reset the map to make sure there IS an initial river system (have seen a few maps where it seemingly fails to generate), that the river actually connects up, and that there's a decent distribution of stone across the top two levels, but there seems to be a hard limit of one stone patch on the lowest level, and because of that it's not possible to hold out for phase 2's cheaper buildings before building more than one or two excavators.
The part that drives me insane is that I don't see many different ways to proceed on any given map. The top two levels are basically the same every time and sometimes I finish it with more money than I started with, but because of how expensive it is to get power around the bottom that money just evaporates in fewer turns than I can make it back. It's hard to feel like the majority of maps Highlands generates are even winnable.
Ouch. Well, I'm not sure what we're doing differently, precisely... you shouldn't need more than one or two Excavators? It's fine to have to build some, and it's not worth wasting your total coverage to delay building Excavators; due to order of operations, you need to build them before Scrubbers, and you'll probably need one, so you might want to build one with the initial starting budget.
I personally delay building greenhouses as late as possible, waiting until the verge of bankruptcy, and only in places where I won't build more scrubbers. I feel like that helps with getting the most out of greenhouse placement. Fun fact, if you have a single wind turbine in the middle of nowhere, the best coverage is to place 4 scrubbers above, below, left and right of it, then 3 greenhouses (1 line and 2 L pieces).
Otherwise, well, the game's hard to put into words. I recorded a video if it'll help. Although, maybe it's a puzzle you'd rather solve yourself? Up to you if you want to watch it! (Still uploading at the moment of writing.)
Played the first two maps without realizing A) I could pan around to see the whole area, and B) I could change the shape of the greenhouses. So glad I read this comment. That's what happens when you don't read the controls, I guess!
This game is an absolute breath of fresh air. Once I finish it I'm going to go back and play the original jam version to see how it all started.
edit- the mac version was crashing constantly for me but i reinstalled and it seems to be fixed! again WHAT a beautiful game, i love it
<3
There is a bug on the 3rd "area" (it might be the 4th), I am to add biodiversity but I can only see buildings to make 3 biomes, the swamp biome building is missing and the third 'tab' doesn't show up which is where that building is located. I'm on my 9th run and I've ran into this bug multiple times rendering the level impassable
Hey there, really sorry about this, it seems to be a problem with the undo/saving system :( From what I understand if you can beat it without any saving and loading it should work. If you really want to just skip it, pop me a message on twitter or email and I'll tell you some dev hacks :P
Incredible game. I've been loving it! Super unique concept too. Keep it up!
Thank you :)
Very cool game! Love it. Nice and peaceful playing at my own paste :) very nice! There was no tutorial or anything but i got the idea fast enough how it works and was partly the fun really! But maybe some tips here and there would have been helpful or to clear up why i can only build one windmill onto the “rock building” instead of more then one.
I would love to get feedback on my game so if you have time please look at my sim city like puzzle game: https://guldor.itch.io/citybuilder
No idea if you want feedback but here we are…
The currency of the game was not very clear to me, i did not know when i would run out of gain anything and completly misted the currency to begin with. It feels a bit outside of the game. like there is mysterious money. Not sure if currency is needed at all just building and trying to get the best version(without making mistakes) could be enough.
Also i had trouble placing buildings on the bottom since the UI was in the way. An other thing i would love to see is that after building you can build the same building again instead of having to click on the icon again.
Overall very cool! Love it and want to play it again!
Thanks for the feedback :) I'll check out your game when I get some time
I think I found a bug. Cleared all buildings on the peninsula but somehow stuck on 64%. I used the destruction pylon to hover over the entire map but it didn't seem like I missed anything.
https://imgur.com/1Mg2MnM
Damn that's definitely a bug, really sorry about that :(
this game is incredible good! It's totally different from a city building game, art is awesome and gameplay is so much interesting and relaxing! Loved it!
Thank you :)
I had to dial it down to easy because I'm terrible, but what a relaxing time. Solving puzzles and making a beautiful landscape you leave behind on your way to parts unknown.
<3
hell yeah!
i remember the game from ludum dare, the progress is amazing :D i liked playing it then and love it right now :D cant wait what next updates will bring
Thank you!
i really like it especially as hobbyist unity dev i am really impressed with how far such a small team has come
Thank you :D
Really nice game, loving the art style and enjoying playing it so far.
Couple of things, the viewport can shake constantly when trying to move the camera to the middle when a level is complete.
Tier three isn't explained that well, you basically have build a network of pylons and ports so you can build the other buildings?
Ah thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoyed the game :)
What a great little game, I am hooked.
Rotation of buildings (particularly greenhouses) is very important, a fact that isn't made immediately obvious to you in-game.
Thank you! And thanks for the feedback
Very good graphics & unique conception!
<3
<3
I bought this game a couple of days ago, and I've already spent a number of hours on it. I was so delighted that first time I put a greenhouse down and got that burst of green coins. Such a cute game that rewards you all along the way. I really needed something environmentally positive. :D
:D wonderful
When I click zen mode it doesnt do anything?
Hey :) it just makes it so you don't get a score at the end
I mean like when I click the zen mode checkbox it stays empty
Should be fixed with the patch I just posted!
Brilliant! Thank you :)
I love the idea and would love to be able to play it, but it doesn't show up properly on an ultra-wide monitor. There's no screen resolution settings, and it looks like the vertical height of screen elements is based on the width of the screen - so everything runs off the top of the screen.
Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.
(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)
e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080
Thanks! It looks like the width and height are switched in the command below, but it worked. (FYI - it'll still use the previous full screen/windowed setting, but Alt+Enter toggles that fine).
I knew there must be some way to make Unity use a particular resolution, but was not finding how for the life of me.
I absolutely love the artstyle and the gameplay is fantastic!
Thank you :D
One of a kind game, the graphics are fantastic and the gameplay is engaging.
<3
I liked the vibe of this game, and the learning curve was hard enough but not too steep. It turned out to be a puzzle game more than a resource/automation management game - I got some happiness when that light bulb when on for me.
After I figured the basics out, though, I didn't see much reason to continue. It needs a little more complexity or new challenges to keep me coming back.
Thank you, and that's a fair point, we're working on it :)
This game is fantastic! I especially love to watch the scene once the game is won and all the machinery is cleaned up. Are there any plans to allow revisiting previous maps? Perhaps combined with a high score system where clicking the score would load the reclaimed map.
Interesting idea, thanks :)
At first it looks way to easy, but when playing it is atleast a bit of a challange (played only first two stages). I think there is enough challange in this game, and im intressted in to where it wil go.
One thing: The mainmenu GUI is not working properly on my 21:9 aspect ratio. No problem in the game itself, so not realy important. But a GUI scale option would be nice.
Keep up the Great work
- P
Thanks for the feedback, pleased you are enjoying it :)
Really enjoying this game, it's a twist on the usual "city-building" simulator and creating a landscape is really satisfying.
A couple of queries: I noticed that the waterways dry-up when the pumps are recycled which seems a shame and surely impacts on delivery and transport of the recycled equipment to the rocketship. Is there any way to prevent this?
Hey Zagrebista, this is actually intentional, you're supposed to leave the water pumps until last and try not recycle them :)
Thanks! :D
I've hit another stumbling block - on the "mountain" stage (the third one) I can't seem to raise the biomes percentage over 29% (40% is needed to advance) even though they're clearly covering over half the map and all three biomes I can build have a tick on their creators.
There's a bug on the mountain stage where the game wants you to make wetland. There is not supposed to be any wetland on the mountain stage. Sorry about that, the only fix I've found so far is to restart the map :(
Ah, okay. Hopefully that'll get ironed out in a future update (I know it's still in development). Am enjoying the game a lot, so can live with re-starting the map. :)
Playing it again, it seems that when you quit to the menu then continue the saved game, it changes from three biomes to four, so the issue seems to be with loading saved games.
*reverse factorio*
Android version?
Not at the moment!
is it planned
Not right now but that could change in the future
I was really enjoying this game, up until the mountain level. I don't know if I'm just being stupid or what, but there just aren't ever enough trees to create all the flower fields required.
I struggled with this too! After only just beating it, vfqd told me about a strategy that makes it significantly easier. I don't want to spoil it for you if you want to figure it out for yourself though!
Please do tell, I have absolutely no interest in slamming my head against this wall anymore.
You only need a small piece of fynbos to start a fire, so if you plan your excavators so that they either just cut off one tree, or that a tree creates fynbos across a river, you can use that little piece as a firestarter for forests while keeping all of the rest of the fynbos for biodiversity.
This way you're not using up the existing trees for forests, and any new trees that you get from the Arboretum can also potentially be used for beehives.
Another possible approach I've found to work is to leave unscrubbed wasteland around the edge of the tiles that will become forest, then build new scrubbers/greenhouses on the margin around the forest after the placing the arboretums. You need to plan ahead a little to make sure you can actually get power to those parts but otherwise its quite simple and can give quite a lot of tiles for fynbos.
I really love this game. It is clam, relaxing & addictive.
Thank you!
Found this while exploring itch.io, I love it, really calm an relaxing, ultra light and really adictive, beautifull pixelart an art style, i´m just on stage 2, but it really catched me up
Thank you :)
The UI is broken on ultra-wide screen (3440x1440) for the panel where you choose terrain in main menu. Top bit of it is not visible as it is off screen. The "Welcome to Terra Nil" has the "0% of 50%" circle over the text, again probably cause of the alignment. Popup/tooltip for the bottom-left circle, again off-screen.
You need to test the game against ultra-wide. In Unity you can add new resolutions to test in the aspect ratio drop-down in game view.
More and more people have access to these kinds of resolutions so you need to either add support for it or you need to lock the game res to aspect ratios you designed for so that we have black borders on sides when game will not work well on ultra-wide.
You misspelled "could" a few times. Other than that, pretty legit.
Seconded! I would love to fully explore this game but cannot
Sorry we overlooked this! Until an update's released that has better resolution-independent support, you can run the game using command line parameters to force a 16:9 (windowed?) aspect ratio.
(Whenever I do this for something I might use often, I make a shortcut to the executable and the command line parameters to the shortcut's properties.)
e.g. TerraNil.exe -screen-height 1920 -screen-width 1080
Hi. I'm trying to play on OSX, but the downloaded version says it can't be opened. Can you help me with this?
Ditto. I copied Terra Nil into applications, and double finger-clicked to open the menu, went to "open", and a "can't be opened" dialog appeared.
From what I understand, catalina has some weird permissions issues running unity games.
If you change the permissions it should work. Try running this command in the terminal in the parent directory of the app
sudo chmod a+x "Terra Nil.app"/Contents/MacOS/*
I'm have the same issue and fix said that's the files not found
Hi mac folks, finally got a mac to test on today. I got the command a bit wrong before, it's actually:
sudo chmod a+x "Terra Nil.app"/Contents/MacOS/*
Make sure to run this in the same directory as Terra Nil
I'll edit my previous post to be correct as well :)
When I run the command it says "no such file or directory," what do I do
think the game has softlocked because I'm at stage 3, and the game says I'm 65% of the way through recycling... but there's absolutely nothing left. At all.
Damn, sorry about that! That definitely seems like a bug. I'll check it out. You might need to restart the map, sorry!! :(
fair enough, thanks for the quick reply! game is otherwise perfect lol
Beautiful, relaxing, and with a surprising amount of depth. Absolutely love it.
Thank you!
Not sure if you're aware of this, but when you try to launch the game on Windows 10 it throws a Windows Smart Screen error and tries to prevent you from launching the game. I've done a bit of research after encountering this error before, and it's apparently a problem with Unity games that have a custom icon. For some reason Windows flags the icon as a security risk.
EDIT: This Unity forum post describes the issue. https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-5-the-digital-signature-is-not-valid-when-...
Thanks, I'll check it out
waterpumps are a bit glitchy when you use the undo button, i've watched my riverbeds fill up more than they ought to be after an undo before.
adore the game. i wish there was an option to start from latter stages of restoration when replaying a level - with like, maybe suboptimal map states for balance? i've been stuck on mountain for ages and am considering going back to floodplain baby land so that i can see all the charming animals again.
Glad you like it, and thanks for the feedback!
This is a wonderful game, the most incisive take on builder mechanics I've seen. A few bits of feedback, most of which echo things other players have said:
* Resource-based failure detection has a pretty reliable false positive when building a greenhouse near 0 that nets you enough to keep playing. See attached screenshot below.
* I'm finding I often run out of trees before I reach the pollination goal in phase 2, and the game doesn't offer any guidance as to how I can build in this or the prior phase to avoid this. All the other mechanics offer pretty clear built-in learning experiences like, "arrange your rivers and wetlands carefully to contain fires", whereas I don't really know what I can do to earn myself some breathing room for the tree+bees goal. It's possible I'm missing some point of strategy here though.
* The "continue" button on the game failure dialog doesn't seem to do anything.
* The "exit" button should ask for confirmation, and/or its caption should be amended to clarify that it means exiting the game entirely.
Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you're enjoying the game! I've interestingly found beehives to be the easiest in testing. Maybe for the purposes of your playthrough, try placing them before doing a burn or the hydroponiums. But in a more general sense, I'll think about your feedback and how I can incorporate it, thanks!