ranchoman 2021-04-26 07:37
The menus / ship setting are a cool set up! It did seem like the mouse wasn't working most times for digging, but I think F worked as expected.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Space Trench Miner
By notime4games
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 698 | 3.09 | 24 | |
| Fun | 750 | 2.77 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 690 | 2.77 | 24 | |
| Theme | 99 | 4.13 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 186 | 3.88 | 24 | |
| Mood | 560 | 3.06 | 24 |
The menus / ship setting are a cool set up! It did seem like the mouse wasn't working most times for digging, but I think F worked as expected.
Really really cool, love the opening menu where it selects where to go. Could maybe get resources faster so that you can buy upgrades sooner though.
Really like the graphics in general the most.
I thought it was a little slow paced. I thought the overall look and feel were consistent. The little intro animation was cool too. I think a little audio would have been great.
Pretty cool game. Reminds me of Steamworld: Dig :)
Terraria style digging is cool!
This reminds me of those launcher games, where you gradually get better and go further. I love the idea and it fits the theme quite well. It was a little too slow for my tastes tho
Pretty good and solid game! The escape mechanic (waiting for the rope/hook) is a nice touch. Congrats!
Nice graphics, could evolve into a really nice little game! Good work!
Nice mining game, with all the mechanics you would expect from the genre.
The cost of the first upgrades and the time required to mine seems well balanced for me, even at the start.
I would have loved more content : more type of upgrades, more block types you could encounter when you go deeper, a final objective, ... But for a compo, it is already great.
Graphics are nice and reminded me of Starbound.
There is a bug with the grappling hook. You can sometimes encounter it while you are digging. And it is especially annoying because if you touch it, it cancels your run.
I got also a weird bug when upgrading, but I can not completely explain it, so it may not be reproduced : I had 3117 credits. I bought my last upgrade. But the money showed was still 3117. Then I came back to the main game menu, and the credits showed 617.
When the robot has only one block under and, and when it is not correctly placed, it does not dig the block. It's a little annoying when you have bought many upgrades and you just want to drill faster and faster.
The launching animation is a little confusing. I thought I could click somewhere to choose my destination, or I had to click at the right time to correctly land on the planet. But it is just a non-interactive animation.
Really liked the loop of going to the planet, digging for resources, and coming back to get upgrades. It seems to take too long to get the first upgrade. 100 is a lot when that ends up being 5-10 trips of spending all your time mining at nodes that take 5 hits each. If the first upgrade were 20-30 instead then this would really help with the early game pacing a lot!
Really nice graphics and a neat game loop too! Good work!
The game looks very nice, the controls are nice but I couldnt get around to guessing how to mine the block that i wanted, it seemed based on movement direction or cursor or both? Also the upgrade prices are too high, someone could easily get bored before getting to the first 100
The game looks great. The menu has a cool theme and the tileset is really nice. Love the hook that comes down and gets you when you abort the mining mission.
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but the mining for me was very slow. I think it could have benefited from being much faster. Maybe even by a factor of ten.
Really cool visuals and art, particularly for the menu/overworld. It didn't have much to keep me playing as the only apparent goal was to unlock upgrades, and the upgrades weren't particularly interesting. I also found it a bit confusing that you had to hold the direction you wanted to dig - perhaps a drill graphic that points where you're moving would clear that up, or using the mouse to aim instead of the character's motion.
Excellent theming on the UI elements, and overall on the graphics, feels like a well executed vision :) The mining feels a little too slow, even with a speed upgrade. That said, even with the current speed, more graphical feedback for the mining would've improved the feeling a lot (i.e. faster flashes or even a cracking graphic). Well done on the caves and proc gen too!
The art is great, a little animation would make a lot out of it. The cost of the upgrades I believe might be a little high making it seem a little grindy. In regards to the theme, there is digging going on but there is not really a clear incentive (positive or negative) that connects to the "deeper and deeper" idea. It has a game loop going on that you could explore a bit deeper, congrats on finishing a game in under 48 hrs by yourself! <3
Fun game, nice graphics and smooth controls. As others have said, the progress curve could be better a bit better, but besides that well done!
There are a couple interesting facets about this game, for me.
First is, although the mining gets a bit faster, it seems that the rate of progress stays slow essentially the entire game. I eventually decided to stop playing after getting all level 3 upgrades and one level 4 because I was spending so much time on the game and not getting anywhere. The first upgrade seems especially slow simply because it requires 500 block hits at minimum to get. After that upgrading does become easier, but eventually I ended up just being in the mines for a very long time, even though I could dig a lot faster and get to the more valuable ores.
This speed of the game, where it stays rather slow-paced seemingly the entire game, is a hard sell, to be honest, but it is unexpected too. One surprising aspect is that it is almost pretty engaging, in some sense: it always feels like fast progress is *just out of reach*. This feeling is I suppose somewhat universal to clicker-type games, but I definitely felt it here. I kept thinking I was going to start speeding up the game quite a bit but I never could. I think if the game was just a tiny bit faster, this feeling could carry me through the whole game quite easily.
The second interesting thing is the fuel upgrade. So, of course, because I am so impatient, I immediately go for the speed and power upgrades. But to actually make progress faster the fuel upgrade is absolutely vital due to the ability to mine a greater quantity of valuable ores per run. This is a really neat interaction between the different mechanics.
Overall, I think that particular thing is what I like most about this game. It is kind of like an idle game, or whatever, but the mechanics it uses to do that are really quite neat. It has a lot of the same progression curves I might expect from an idle game, but instead I have to do mining instead of clicking, or whatever, and the choices I make in my upgrades manifest as physical differences of how I can navigate the mine. I think that's pretty cool.