Tiny Islands Brings Me So Much Joy
I want to talk a little bit about this game I've had saved on my itch page forever in my Games that do really cool shit collection called Tiny Islands! It's been years, and I keep coming back to play it every single time I think of it, and I want to share it with more people.
It's a small little game where you build some little islands by placing randomly chosen geographical features like trees, houses, beaches, waves, etc. onto a 9x9 grid and drawing lines around them to close off into islands. There are some "rules" about how each element should be placed relative to other elements, but they're just for scoring and not enforced. It takes about an average of 4 minutes to play through and make yourself a tiny island.
There's a lot I love about this game, but the thing that's been blowing my mind about it is just how much it gets out of how little there is to it. 7 geographical features with simple rules, 3 turns of placing 9 features within a confined section of the grid, and 24 line segments to surround an island. All my islands feel unique, and the rules encourage their positioning to make some sort of sense.
Like here's a finished map of mine where we've got this main big island surrounded by waves and a lone brave boat coming back to shore, and a smaller little island that has a church on it, and an itty bitty isle in the corner with only a couple of houses on it. Why is the smaller island practically empty, and why does it also have a church on it in line of sight to the church on the mainland? Are the waters so dangerous that the people on the smaller island aren't able to easily cross the channel? Maybe the island is owned by a wealthy recluse so it only needs to have their mansion and their church! But what about the itty bitty isle? Could it be a secret hideaway? There's so much environmental storytelling to read into, and I find myself coming up with these little stories about the people who live there as I build it out.
Another thing I find interesting about the rules, is that it makes the game essentially a sort of soft wave function collapse algorithm. Here's a bunch of elements and rules about how they can fit together; collapse the wave and decide where they go. You will occasionally be given the choice between placing one of two tiles that both will break the rules no matter where they're placed, but you're allowed to do that! Don't ask what the boat is doing on land behind that house.
Or maybe DO ask! Is it shipwrecked? Being built or under repair?
The rules also encourage drawing interesting island shapes. Beaches give you one point for each edge of island they touch, which means you should give your island lots of little nooks and bends to maximize the potential surface area if you need to place a beach in the area. Houses like being near different features, so they often end up along the coasts where you can place both water and land features next to them.
This kind of simplicity with depth is one of those things that really get me excited about game design. The closest I've come to hitting a similar simplicity:depth ratio is Demon's Dozen, but that's a card game and it's difficult to get video game friends to play card games.
Writing this out and really appreciating what I love about Tiny Islands, it really reminds me of one of my favourite GDC talks: Stop Getting Lost: Make Cognitive Maps, Not Levels by Nicolas Oueijan. The act of designing a map is so incredibly interesting to me, and Tiny Islands' simple and iconographic art style really feels like a execution in modelling a map with the 5 elements of a cognitive map (paths, landmarks, districts, edges, nodes).
For example let's check out the map above and find it's fairly easy to pick out the different elements!
- Churches are pretty identifiable landmarks since there's only supposed to be one per island, so here you've got the church in the mountains to the north, and the church on the cliff face overlooking the beach to the south. I'd also say the mountain range on the north island is pretty recognizable.
- You've got the path from the shore to the church in the mountains, and the river acts as a path between the two islands, with a strong current flowing through its center and boats sailing down it.
- The eastern part of the southern island feels like a distinct district from the west with the tree line acting as an edge between the two. Maybe it's a class segregated district, where the wealthy live close to town, the port, the beach, and the church, and the poor live out in a more barren land.
- With how central the church/beach combination feels, I'd imagine that beach being like a node. From there people either leave south on boats, northwest to go into town, northeast to the farmland, or straight eastward through the forest to go to where the deckhands live.
All really interesting stuff! I'm regularly inspired by this game. Maybe one day I'll go full map sicko mode and make the "Fucked Up Little Man On A Fucked Up Tiny Island Elden Ring Map Style" game that's been kicking around my brain for a hot while. Either way I'll be playing this as long as I possibly can.
