Teen Island Simulator
Chris McDowall's pen-and-paper game Teen Island turned into a zero-player game.
Press SPACE (or ENTER) to proceed to the next day. Use the context menu to see the roster or to reset the game.
Status | Prototype |
Platforms | HTML5 |
Rating | Rated 4.3 out of 5 stars (72 total ratings) |
Author | watabou |
Genre | Simulation |
Made with | OpenFL |
Tags | Text based, zero-player |
Comments
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How to actually customize teens? Cant figure it out, when i do they just dissapear
At what point do they disappear? You just enter some names and choose some pronouns and then press "Proceed".
Is this like... normal? Why does everyone have a crush on Alice?
This is not exactly normal, but this is possible, especially since she is Alice the *Dream*.
The first 13 days were hard to watch. So much arguing and arguing, then people started dropping like flies. By day 26 the arguing had stopped (and I think the idol burning ritual may have helped with that. It was Dat Snatch's idea.) and things were looking up, the raft was getting made. Day 28 King Keef and Dat Snatch haven't returned to camp. Is this going to be another Shantasia incident? Thankfully, they come back the next day. Day 31, 3 people die and the raft is dashed to pieces. It's just King Keef and Pregnasty. They get along okay but were never in a clique or as a couple. Productive as ever they plug away at the work. Day 38 a tidal wave takes King Keef. It's down to Pregnasty - she's preggers!! There's no food left and the camp quality is 2! Thanks Tidal wave. Maybe - just maybe she can do it, someone as the only person, she gets assigned to things she does NOT need like wood and camp work when she's getting hungrier and hungrier. But she keeps getting 6 food when I least expect it, the camp is burned for fire. On Day 49, It's a fishing weekly event but my poor girl is out looking for wood again. The sand is enraged. She goes out just like Big Chris and Skiffle. S M H
Names taken from a Saturday Night Live sketch called "Rap Song"
this play through was wild and went on for 110 days.
Everyone died
noooooooooo, they fought so hard!
Heya! that was cool! Maybe you could add other pronouns? like they/them
Reading this was very entertaining! Reminds me of an old auto-played Hunger Games I used to play :)
I wish that you could also customise which attributes the teens get, rather than just add custom names. But this is really fun to watch either way.
I suggest you fix the 'oversee' on the very first page to 'overseas' lol
(Totally game-breaking, unplayable)
👍
Luckiest I've been. Day 7 got cave fit for king and camp quality increased by 7. Day 8 they successfully launched
I don't even know how I've become so invested in this, but I am
kinda wishing we could choose who gets which attributes (smart, athletic, etc.) when making a custom set of teens though
I managed to get everyone to survive oh thank god
Quick Problem: when i try to add my own teenagers
i only see 1 add a teenager and 3 cancel
how do i continue to the story with the added teenagers?
If you add enough teenagers (5 or 6, I don't remember the exact value) the "proceed" option becomes available.
Oh ok thank you
So true and so great - the only quarm would be that even teens aren't stupid enough to assign someone to building the base when they have no wood to do it with and haven't assigned anyone to get some!
This is great! You should make an option to save the story to a PDF or something, I got a great one and I wanted to show it to the group of friends I've put in as characters.
everyone died in 4 dayd of hunger cause they all fought with each other instead of getting food
I need more of these games, wow :D
What is this gerne of games called??
It is definitely a zero-player game but this category is probably too broad to be useful...
Yep :/
All of my characters have a crush on the same person whoops
I guess that person is a "Dream"? That happens when someone is happened to be "charming" and "rebellious" at the same time.
Ohh, I see. Cool!
:)
... And this is so good for them! 'cause the only other one looking at them, in the camp, is Oliver, and he's just a bloated corpse, sleeping a dreamless dream after a spider bit him a couple of days ago.
:( Oh, that f*****g spider did it again! Nooo! Tommy too...
I feel the end is nigh.
R.I.P
Hilarious - looks so simple but jeez it was gripping, nice work
Amazing game, and very entertaining. My only wish keeping track of characters is made easier and perhaps custom names. 9.99/10
Ho. ly. crap. This is entertaining in so many ways and I've already gone through several generations. But my favorite was the one which lasted 57 days and everyone died. Talk about a roller coaster. I was rooting for them so hard, and they came SO close to surviving, but Fate had other plans. Here's how it went:
Everyone's stranded. They've got their cliques. Things suck, but they pick up. Henry loses his mind, trashing the camp for three days straight while everyone's on the verge of hunger. Henry eventually returns, but the very next day, the Cave has claimed three of them for mystical purposes: two lovers (Audrey and Claire) and (Billy). Things get better until a storm wipes out their camp. Joshua, who was terrorizing everyone, finally receives divine punishment and dies.
Progress picks up, but Sarah dies to a tiger attack. Everyone's arguing and won't collect food. When the fighting stops, a horde of locusts descends upon them for a week. Someone catches a boar, killing it at the last second to avoid mass starvation. But Audrey gets the madness and returns changed, no longer Claire's lover. Tommy falls into a pit while foraging and dies. Claire and Billy are still being frequently summoned to the Cave for mystical purposes, wanting nothing to do with Audrey now.
Finally the raft is built, but Sophia and Henry drown and the camp is wrecked! Is it a curse on Audrey? George is crushed by rocks while foraging with Audrey. She's definitely cursed. They rebuild their camp. Audrey gets hit by a coconut (poor Audrey) and loses her identity (again). Jack and Zoe are secretly lovers. Billy has developed a crush on Claire. Audrey is a cursed third wheel.
The raft is built, not once but twice more: The first time they are missed by a ship and must return on a broken raft. The second (and last) raft is built, Audrey has a Breakdown and on the same day her curse finally claims her and she drowns when the raft is sent out. Food is scarce now and the raft is destroyed for wood. Billy and Zoe succumb to hunger. In a desperate attempt to survive, Jack and Claire strip the camp for wood and forage, but there's no food to be found. They die the next day.
11/10 Still a better love story than Twilight -IGN
Best season of Lost, ever.
Thanks! I need to figure out a way to make following individual castaways easier...
Audrey is 100% cursed
R.I.P Audrey
An annoying thing about itch on Firefox is pressing spacebar to advance the game also scrolls the page down. Could you perhaps implement an alternate advance key?
Added P as an alternative hotkey.
Thanks very much!
This is pretty engaging, but I wish it was easier to keep track of the castaways' history. Everything blends together too easily; it's tough to keep track of how well the group has been over time, let alone keep a dozen random characters straight (and once they've been whittled down enough to keep track of, the game is basically over). It doesn't help that there's no way to see casualties between their death and the end of the game—and even then, their traits (and other characters' crushes and enmity towards them) have been wiped clean, making it hard to remember who's who.
Even so, sometimes a story is clear enough to jump out at you. Like the time Eddie the class clown came up with plans to "help" the group gather food two days in a row, killing everyone in the process. Dammit, Eddie...and also whoever decided to keep putting him on the food-gathering team.
Quick bug I just noticed: I got a group with five rebels, but none of them had crushes. I'm pretty sure that's supposed to happen no matter how many Rebels there are.
EDIT: Also, the Blowing In the Wind event doesn't seem to stop anyone from working on the camp.
(Minor not-a-bug notice: If possible, it might be a good idea to make the message for an athlete acting like a Jerk distinct from a normal Jerk, because that looks like a bug otherwise.)
Yeah, it's kind of hard to follow specific characters. I considered changing presentation to fix it, but it didn't happen. There is an undocumented feature that can help: pressing C displays the current roster (names, traits, cliques).
I can add name customization, but assigning "traits" is too much work for a project I'm not really working on, sorry :)
I would also love to see name customization!
yes i was going to ask that...
maybe these dorks should work like 1 more day on the raft instead of making a new one every few days because they keep breaking lol. good generator
lol my first ever "playthrough" had everyone survive, then the second immediately after had two deaths in the first week. I love random generators.
Oh no... this is addicting. You shouldn't have given me the power to generate a new story with just a space key press, whenever I get to the end screen of a story. I can't stop.
they all died in three days because two people wouldn't stop arguing , how appropriate !
Space causes my browser to scroll when pressed, would be good to prevent the default behaviour. Edit: The fullscreen mode helps
Is there any way to strategically affect the game? (Like choosing if they shall go and search for food) I know you can reroll your squad, but its random, so I wouldn't call it strategically affect the game.
I love your work bdw.
then it wouldn't be a zero player game xD
I enjoyed this. ;D I'd love to be able to export these stories it creates. Then we can do some sharing and comparing. Fastest escape/fewest survivors/longest days/etc. Can we get some leaderboards? :D Will I ever see a "project" finished. The people doing them always die before its done! LOL
I am going to add the export feature. Leaderboards are kind of pointless if you can't affect the result, aren't they? :)
Its noise. artifacts. remnants of play. immediate feedback nostalgia. I've found the silliest of things with a leaderboard can get people to do the most annoying tasks repeatedly (in the mobile games indie space) and they get something out of it. Probably an endorphin hit ;) But leaderboards don't affect everyone. Its about 1 in 3, in my limited anecdotal experience, can be lured (to varying degrees too. some people can't say no to a leaderboard once they place on it.) I use it for retention and engagement mechanism in my line of work. but I digress! bah blah blah!
But what drove me to ask, was I truly wanted to see what others saw! I found the comment stream about results enticing and entertaining. However you bubble out stats would have brought me another ounce of joy. Who got off the fastest, I'd like to see how that happened, and who lasted the longest and were successful and failed (how grueling in both cases.) i.e., fnd a way to make a Zero Player Shared Experience.
Play stats might be a happy medium, but I mean... zero player stuff is fun to dabble with imo, but investing further is just a labor of love. If the muse wants, the muse gets... lol. I am just happy you put this out as it is. It was interesting to read and pass time... :D It was a modern Lazy Oregon Trail style experience... very nostalgic in that regard.
I noticed pressing "c" will open up the cast of characters and their traits, but there are some issues associated with it. clicking anywhere on the cast, to move it or close it, will count as clicking for the sake of going to the next day.
Additionally, the cast window has to be closed and reopened any time there is a change to the cast, such as a death or new trait. This means closing it will skip a day, and opening it again will block the view and you have to move it, skipping a day.
Yes, it's bugged. Ironically, it is a debugging feature itself, that's why I didn't want to spend time on fixing it :) You can close the window without switching to the next day by pressing ENTER or ESC.
If you end up updating it I'd love a way to tell who is in what clique and what the different week effects mean. Also things like having crushes? Does it make them more effective or what?
You can optionally download the rules for the original game this is based off. Link in the game description.
- Crush: Pick a Castaway to have a Crush on. If
that Castaway ever spends the day resting, this
Castaway slacks off from their job to tend to them.
You may want to check the rules here. "Crush" doesn't make a castaway more effective, it's a "weakness" :)
the first couple times I ran this they were all saved in a week. Finally I got a group that spelled disaster.
The popular clique kept slacking off and ended up letting 3 people starve in just over a weeks time. After that, they finally started pulling their weight, but only if they were all together. Food no longer became an issue, so the camp improved consistently. The popular kids kept taking holiday every week and only once came back with gifts.
By the 4th week, the raft was ready, but destroyed in open water. 2 drowned. When the rest got to shore, a bear attached the camp and mauled 2 more. Thing began falling apart.
Feeding everyone was less of an issue with half the group gone, but jungle madness became a regular thing, 2 people vanished into the jungle within a day of eachother and another was snatched up by giant birds, only to return days later. When they were there, it was difficult to get work done. Slowly but surely, they built a second raft.
Immediately, the raft was smashed on the rocks, 3 more died. Now only 2 remain; their spirits are broken. They often spend time in camp, not working. When food runs out, one of them will get enough food to last the two of them several days. They stopped getting wood and just demolished the camp. A tidal wave washed away whatever was left.
Day after day, they just sit there, burning their camp and only getting food when needed. On day 61, Phoebe spontaneously combusted. Sarah is alone now, she has stopped trying to get food. She starved a day later.
This one was much more interesting, because the popular clique CHOSE to let some of the unpopular group starve. After that things got better until bad luck (or bad sailing) continually thwarted their efforts. The rest spelled disaster as time went on.
The Populars are bad for the group. They are so bad that it makes me doubt if I interpret the rules about them correctly.
There are very few things in the game that have positive effects, and plenty with potentially-crippling weaknesses. Especially if the little castaways are driven by internal AI instead of one or more humans who can account for those weaknesses...
Really cool. Can be hard to follow resources and who is in what clique and why they're fighting. Ran into a couple bugs with day reports stopping halfway through and some teens being left off the ending roster. Everyone had a crush on poor Zoe and she died and nobody even remembered her at the end.
You can see the roster (but not the cliques) by pressing C. It's a debugging feature, so it's not particularly nice and it's glitchy. But yeah, I agree that it's hard to follow individual castaways.
This happens to teens separated from the main group e.g. those who got lost. They are neither rescued nor confirmed dead.
The moral of my story was that if you're an annoying thug who sneaks out to eat all the food (looking at you, Billy), you'll probably stay alive when everyone else gets eaten by lions or vanishes into pits! :D
I love every one of your generators/simulators, keep up the excellent work!
For me, Billy was the Cadet, and often went off on his own to hunt. He frequently returned with plenty of meat for the group, until the day he didn't.
Cadets seem to produce a lot of food but are always doomed to die. When I have 40+ food, you don't need to keep hunting, man!
Yeah, the rest of them take the amount of stored food into account, but Cadets don't. They just like to be alone out there...
Cheers!
Love this, lmao. Simple but can be endless fun
First run ended up with half of them dead and the rest rescued
Thanks! You were lucky :)
So good. So depressing.
Audrey dies of hunger.
THE END.
Best thing I've seen so far is 5 dead in 3 days; two by mountain lions, two by bear, and one starved. Chloe was never given food from the very beginning.
Because of the attacks, they didn't get any work done. Next day, all the food they find is ruined by pests. Day 5 the remaining 7 stay in camp to rest and starve to death.
How the hell do 8 people starve to death in 5 days!
Survivors:
None
RIP:
* Jamie: killed by a lion
* Harry: killed by a lion
* Lily: killed by a bear
* Emily: killed by a bear
* Chloe: died of hunger
* Sophia: died of hunger
* Charlie: died of hunger
* Hannah: died of hunger
* Anna: died of hunger
* Zoe: died of hunger
* Claire: died of hunger
* Alice: died of hunger
Actually 3 days without food is enough to wipe the party!
I didn't realize until I read the actual rules that food includes water. 3 days no water will kill you.
I had the entire party dead in five days, thanks to a class clown accidentally sabotaging all food-gathering operations for two days straight.
In my first playthrough my entire party died in 4 days(!) because they preferred arguing to food gathering.
Happens to real-life castaways all the time!