Problem Machine
The flood mechanic is really cool, but it's a little hard to tell what the level of the water is before it flows into your chamber and drowns you. Fun little puzzler, good enough to keep me playing through all 9 caves.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD15 → DiggR
By drzool
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innovation | 12 | 3.81 | ||
| Fun | 14 | 3.71 | ||
| Theme | 20 | 3.74 | ||
| Overall | 14 | 3.71 | ||
| Community | 52 | 3.27 | ||
| Graphics | 54 | 3.29 | ||
| Coolness | 64 | 22 | ||
| Humor | 83 | 2.20 | ||
| Audio | 124 | 1.17 |
The flood mechanic is really cool, but it's a little hard to tell what the level of the water is before it flows into your chamber and drowns you. Fun little puzzler, good enough to keep me playing through all 9 caves.
Cool game.
The bombs felt under used though
Very nice flooding :)
Lovely, and sometimes hard to predict.
Flooding is very cool. Great fun. Good work!
That was a lot of fun. Makes me think you could do a whole game around Dwarf Fortress flood farming.
I really liked how the water works!
Awesome! Great concept and implementation. Could use a little less subtle indicator of water depth, and maybe a metagame about minimizing the number of steps/bombs placed/blocks destroyed.
Awesome game, and not just for the Dwarf Fortress flashbacks it induced. Played all the way through -- very cool.
Great game, the flooding works very nicely.
As others said, managing the level and flow of the water to avoid drowning is a really interesting mechanic. Great stuff.
Yeah, good stuff. Flesh this out a little and it'll be proper awesome.
Hah, I had a lot of fun with this. Nice job. :)
One of the most finished entries I've played this time.
The flooding level was a really really cool game meachanic! The bomb was a bit unnecessary and I didn't use it all after the start. If it had a bit more interesting levels and much more polish, this would best of compo material.
i like that this game is really about controlling the movement of water around, and breaking a wall and watching water rush in is wonderful. it's also a bit tedious to play, in that the solution is usually obvious (and is usually to break all the walls i can reach) but requires a lot of keypresses to execute. having to click the game at the start of each stage is annoying - because i have to take my hand off the keyboard - especially when the message doesn't even bother showing up.
Loved it :) Took me quite a few turns to work out how the flooding mechanism worked, but I liked that it wasn't handholding you and gave you space to work it out.
Had to give up on the forth level though, after a bug caused the guy to keep digging on the spot and it stopped taking my input :(
Good job with the water, it's very cool. At first I was worried that my game was very similar to your game, but it turns out they are quite different.
With some polish, this could be really nice.
Flooding = fun. I love mashing down a wall and then frantically running to throw a bomb to cut off the flow. Swimming animation for the dwarf is great. :)
I love it. Though it does seem like digging out large areas is often too viable a strategy. I'm not sure if that was intended. Replaying it, I definitely approach the puzzles differently than the first time I beat them.
Very nice puzzle game. The "click to play" was a little bit annoying since you have to let go of mouse to dismiss it.
Got through the game, awesome. :D But never really had a clue what bombs are for.
Cool flooding mechanic. At some points it turned into just clearing out a bunch of spaces for water to flow in before you let it out. Didn't really find a good use for bombs either, since they make non-diggable squares. Otherwise, really good job, would like to see this with music and sound.
This is a pretty cool game, it seems like it teeters on the edge of being a really cool game. I like the basic mechanics, including the flooding. The water level spread reminds me of dwarf fortress, which can't help but be a good thing. On the other hand, it can be hard to distinguish certain of the water levels from each other: the color difference is just not substantial enough, so it can be hard, looking at the water, to tell if it will drown you or not. This can lead to some awkward situations.
Hmm, interesting take on flooding. Manipulation of waterlevels is cool. Bombs didn't seem to be that useful, as they made a spot unpassable.
Flood mechanic is quite interesting; I especially like the graphical effect, obscuring things based on how deep the water is :)
Like the flooding mechanic, reminded me a lot of Dwarf Fortress. I do think the drowning time is a little harsh, a little more time to swim in deeper waters would be nice.
Fun game and concept. I think if anything it is just suffering a bit from a lack of clear communication to the player about how the water is flowing and what dangers it represents (depth levels etc). I took me about 10 or more minutes before I finally started seeing the differences between the deeper blue water and the lighter safe waters. Once I learned how to navigate and correctly read the water the game became a lot more fun messing around with relative displacements of space and dirt as well as strategically using a bomb. A mechanic I love is that you can use the bomb to stop water following you but it comes at the cost of creating an impenetrable wall after the fact. That is a very nice touch. It lets the player use as many bombs as they want but they have to understand what they are doing or they may trap themselves.
I was able to play and beat about 6 of 9 levels. I started getting a little fatigued with a bunch of deaths on level 6 or 7 or so.
Solid entry though!
Like everyone else, nice flooding.