I'm a little late here but HELLO EVERYONE! Last month, June 12, was the one year anniversary of this game! And like all my other games, I wanted to come and talk a little about the project now that it's a year out!

Like a few previous games before it, I've been a little too busy to update it. And since it's meant to be a simple jam game, there's not too much I want to add to it. But I wouldn't mind going back and polishing up some of the mistakes that naturally came from putting it together in such a short amount of time. But even if I do that, I will certainly leave up the original version submitted for the jam so you can see the differences.

Considering this is my first Jam Game, and it's VERY rough around the edges. I still can't help but kind of love this one. It's simple and cute and not that compelling, but there's just a certain charm to it I like. Is it my favorite game I've made so far? No. But is it damn cute? Yeah! And I appreciate everyone who played it for the jam and left nice comments about it! It was VERY fun and even though I haven't entered any jams since, I do want to join more in the future.

There isn't much unused and behind the scenes stuff for this game because, again, jam game. But I do have some things to show you all!

Here you can see a few things, at the bottom row (from left to right) you have an unused fish drawing which was originally used for the Collection Icon in the menu. An unused white ship. A multicolored version of Beardbeard which i used to know where to place his final colors, and some concept art for the stone tablets.

Above it, on the far right, is a color code for the water and rocks as they get darker as you go up the map. But next to it is the most interesting part! It's a key for where to put all the events in the game! The green icons are the islands, purple are the people who want bugs and fish, red are events, I think yellow are people you can talk to???... Uh... there's circles but idk what they're for off the top of my head. And most importantly, you can see a star marked with the dark tiles! I'll get into that in a second. First I wanna talk about some of those red events! As you can probably tell, most of those things aren't in the game! Nessie, dolphin, whale, submarine, glowing fish, and ufo were all events planned to happen at random, but I just couldn't get them to work or ran out of time. So I axed them. Sad.

But yeah, the star marking. I think it's time I FINALLY reveal how you're supposed to beat this game! So, each dark tile is where one of the weird stone tablets appear out of the ocean. You're meant to mark your map on the tiles where those tablets appear. And when you're done, you'll see a star shape on the map! Which corresponds to the island with the big tablets, particularly the one with the star. Which is where the ending cutscene is hidden when you take the keys to it. Do you see what I'm getting at? How were you supposed to figure this out? The mermaid tells you!... Yeah... It was not clear enough, I'm actually not sure if ANYONE beat it the intended way lol.

Here you can see some alt concepts for where the stone tablets would be, with different icons corresponding to different islands, and even a concept where it just flat out spelled out which tile the treasure was hidden on lol. I think this whole concept was too confusing in retrospect, but I still think it was a neat idea.

One more thing before I go: Did you know I accidentally left in the dev exit to the ending? It's actually on the first map where you start the game after the main menu! But, in the spirit of Cartografree, I won't tell you specifically where it is. And I'll instead mark it on your map. Figure it out yourself.

But yeah, that's that for now. I want to thank you all again for your support when I make dinky little games like this. They're fun to put together and I hope people have fun playing them even when they're not so great. Keep an eye out for some sort of update on Cartografree and the other games who haven't gotten updates yet! And maybe something new eventually if I get the chance! Who knows?