FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD48 → Mineshaft

Mineshaft

By ditam

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2743.6659
Fun2593.6359
Innovation1173.8959
Theme1923.9659
Graphics4683.4259
Humor5152.2541
Mood6152.9750

Comments

elsombrero 2021-04-26 07:55

Not bad at all dude Great Job Everythings are too minimalistic But it's the Jam Good Like it

ditam 2021-04-26 20:33

Thanks @elsombrero!

I've pushed out some bugfixes today, including a major one where Sabotage and TNT could result in perpetually glitched out cards from that round on :-//. Apologies to anyone affected. Hopefully it's properly playable now.

pixelportalz 2021-04-27 00:34

This game is doooio great! Love the idea of using deck/cards in such a creative way. Thank you for the big fix!!

lithia-studios 2021-04-27 00:39

I like the idea of using a deck + card game for the idea of this theme!

samguy 2021-04-27 00:47

Cool concept, good execution. I'd love to be able to see the cards in my hand fully, the space feels a bit cramped as it is. A better explanation of the game objectives would help too. Hope you keep working on it!

blockerz 2021-04-27 00:51

Nice job coming up with a basic card game based on the theme! I liked it. The presentation is good. I was able to learn by playing it. I did notice you can still interact during the AI turns which if you End Turn during the AI turn it plays your cards - serves me right I guess ;).

ditam 2021-04-27 00:57

Thanks guys!

@samguy I'll definitely try working on it, I had to leave behind many items on my to-do list. I agree that the hand visibility needs work, I have multiple improvements in mind for this: - there should be an option to view any card in full, either by sliding them out when hovered, or (maybe on mobile) an optional 2-stage select-and-play workflow - cards of the same type should be stacked with a counter - there's only 7 different action cards in the game, so any hand should fit into 7 slots - probably the whole layout should be shifted up, since the current player's cards are always brought to the bottom anyway (when I first did the layout, I was planning to have the opponent play from the top).

andykswong 2021-04-27 06:10

This is a fun mining card game! I feel that those cards with non-zero cost (cards other than pickaxe/TNT) are not worth it, seem it's better to keep digging than spending money + a turn on those. But then, I only played against AI. Maybe someone can come up with solid strategies using those cards.

dilem 2021-04-27 06:21

I am impressed, really enjoyed playing this! Found it hard to know what cards do because the screen was cut off, but I would really like to play this as a full game. Very well done!

bastienre4 2021-04-27 11:21

I love the concept. It's a nice deck building game. Polish is very good. Removing cards from opponent's hand looks very strong tho. The IA really killed my game haha.

Good job !

wuppos 2021-04-27 11:40

Nice game! At first I did not know what I should be doing, but as I played along I got an idea of what good moves are and what bad moves are. I guess this is always how it is with these kinds of games :) My first game was a really tight victory against the AI, with only one dollar difference. My second game I understood what I was doing, and I won 12 to 5. (Although I am sure that luck played a large role there as well :P) The AI plays its moves pretty slowly. For the first game this is great, because I had no idea what was going on. For the second game it might be nice to be able to speed that up a bit. Besides adding a few sound effects and visual effects (like rock particles when you dig, or explosions when you use TNT), I dont know what other feedback to give. It plays great! Thanks a lot for making this ^_^

axeltherabbit 2021-04-27 13:10

Nice, I liked it and also replayed just to try every card

spydercrawler 2021-04-27 13:18

That was pretty awesome! It really reminds me of dominion. I have mad respect for you for making a card game in 48 hours - I did it for one jam and it was incredibly difficult. I did notice one bug, though - One time I accidentally pressed the end turn button on my turn, then again on the enemy turn. It ended the enemy turn, then had the AI do my turn for me, then discarded all non-pickaxe cards from my hand. Then, the AI played through its own turn. Then, I was able to play again. This put me at a significant disadvantage, but I still was able to pull through in the end. Overall, though, I really enjoyed the game. It had some neat strategy involved. You should try to develop this more! I really think it could become a releasable game if you put a bit more time into it.

ditam 2021-04-27 13:38

Thanks @spydercrawler! Dominion is actually one of my favourite games, so I'm sure it influenced this - in fact, when I started out with my drafts I was planning to have a hand redraw mechanic too, which I ended up scraping partly because it was just too much like Dominion :) A flattering comparison, nonetheless!

As for the AI bugs, @spydercrawler & @wuppos, these issues are happening because there's no proper turn API for the AI to use, so instead it just simulates timeouts and clicks on the cards like the player would... as such, you can click into the AI turn, which causes all kinds of glitches! I'll see if I can add a simple bugfix for this, in the meantime, just think of it as a rouge AI that does not take kindly to interference.

Thank you for the comments.

steve-johnstone 2021-04-27 15:43

I had a lot of fun playing this. I thought it was a neat concept of digging through a deck of cards, and really well executed. I'm impressed that you added an opponent to it. The rules felt interesting enough to keep playing for a second time. Great work!

spyranteros 2021-04-27 16:12

Very nice! Card games aren't easy to make during a jam, let alone compo! Well done!

flatgub 2021-04-27 19:17

Really nifty! Having an AI to play against is a really really nice thing to have and its impressive that you were able to design a card game and have an AI to play against in just 48 hours! I'd honestly consider a print and play version of this to play IRL with friends!

tom-stephenson 2021-04-27 19:33

A great entry, had a lot of fun playing this! The idea is different and fun, and it's even more impressive you found time to add AI (which seems to work really well)! The visuals are nice and intuitive, making the game approachable. Congrats on a great entry, would love to see a physical version one day!

gimbalock 2021-04-27 20:05

I liked the minimalistic style alot. It is so easy to recognize what cards you turn over.

arancutter 2021-04-27 21:34

This is a great idea and I had a lot of fun with it. It's a really unique take on the theme. I think the minimalistic style works quite well. It feels really polished.

Great work!

seanarooni 2021-04-27 23:47

cool little game! I've done a card game before for one of these (and failed a few times) so i know how hard it is. major props. I had a lot of fun planning my turns with the lantern.

lesinvisible 2021-04-28 12:30

Very nice, it was a little hard to understand at first, but then everything went smoothly. Also, it's the first hot-seat game I saw on the LD.

dhim 2021-04-28 13:24

Nice game, I dream of making a card game. But coming out with a cool game mechanic is super hard in 48H!

I think I broke the UI at some point, the sieve seems to workd strangely, then a rock stay on the screen, then the lantern panel would stay...

You should drop a line in the description about what'S the end game / or is it a spoiler ? Edit: I found the end game. I lost cause I spend to much on equipement... Screen Shot 2021-04-28 at 15.21.36.png

Some ideas to go further : * Having 3 possible decks to explore! 2 of them has Diamonds at the end,1 have magma! Anyway it would be the end game if the 2 diamonds are reveal or the magma ( that would cause death ). Greedy greedy

xpycm 2021-04-28 16:55

Good game. However I found a bug. If click "End turn" button while AI is moving, AI begins to play for player, hahaha

boltkey 2021-04-28 23:02

Wow, this is really fun! Any plans on making it a physical game? Feeling like it could be worth it.

phlip45 2021-04-29 02:59

This is super cool. The mechanics really remind me of a board game called Thebes which is an archaeology game where you have to push your luck pulling either dirt tiles or treasure tiles from a bag. If you've not played it you should check it out.

Cards look really clean and nice, the only thing I'd suggest functionality wise is a way to zoom in on the cards. Had to Zoom in quite a bit to see what was written on the cards on the left, and had no way to see what was on the cards in my hand (unless I was missing the way to do that).

Great stuff!

ditam 2021-04-29 07:30

Thanks guys!

@dhim and @xpycm thanks for the bug reports. I'll fix them before the weekend. The Sieve mechanic was added in a rush already into the submission hour, so I'm not entirely surprised it's broken. The AI I discussed above.

@boltkey I might just! I'll probably wait a bit to gather feedback for balancing issues (so not during the rating period), but I can absolutely see myself making a print & play version, in which case I'll be linking it in the description.

@phlip45 I'm not familiar with Thebes but I'll check it out! As for zooming in or viewing hand cards in full, there is no way to do that currently, but it's on my to-do list.

geo3d 2021-04-30 12:55

This is such a different take on the whole 'mining' genre and very well made. I'm not sure if this is a bug but I can buy stuff for the AI while just after I press the 'End turn' button. Also, I can spam the End turn button which I think glitches out the cards. Anyway, Awesome work, lots of fun!

ommadawn 2021-04-30 15:57

Very nice board game :) I played with a friend and we both had a lot of fun playing it ! Awesome entry :smile:

stin 2021-05-01 11:23

Nice game. Good work

martinek 2021-05-01 11:39

I really dig this game, no pun intended. This was just amazing. Great job!

lazzor 2021-05-01 13:58

Nice game and especially great UI with the animations! One bug I encountered was when playing against AI I could always click on the "End Turn" button, even on the AI move. Spamming the button then led to the next 50 moves being autoplayed back and forth. Nonetheless, great job!

ditam 2021-05-01 16:12

Hello guys,

I have pushed out a version that fixes the Sieve action (which had all sorts of issues), and by popular demand, disallows play during AI turns. Thanks for the bug reports @blockerz @spydercrawler @geo3d @xpycm @lazzor!

cheesepencil 2021-05-01 23:11

Fantastic execution. I'm not usually a fan of card-game-as-a-video-game (especially in a jam) but this one worked really well. Sure, it could use a little visual and auditory juice but we all know that 48 hours is never enough time. Once I got the hang of the rules everything made sense. Also programming an AI opponent is a big deal too.

nsadie 2021-05-02 05:35

I liked this game, I thought it was well executed and the gameplay is nice. I think the game needs a bit of juice, and I found that the card descriptions were a little bit to small for me to read.

I will come back to this one I think!

togis 2021-05-03 11:01

What a Blast! My wife and I played your game in stream and we really enjoyed it! Here is a link to the exact place in the video archive if you wish to see it again: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=aC3sZsRjx5g&t=1481s

The gameplay is really nice and I'm sure we can come up with very interesting strategies and it can become very complex. The only thing I would suggest is to allow player to zoom on the card in the shop before buying them, it was a bit small to read for us and we had to rely on your description in this page to know what the card did.

Congratulation! This is really a cool game! :v:

ditam 2021-05-03 21:50

@dhim - I forgot to reply to your suggestion of having 3 decks. I think it's a fascinating idea, but it might change the concept of the game too much. Going to 3 decks from 1 is a bit of a jump, but maybe 2 decks could be introduced more seamlessly (and I'm just spitballing here) - maybe there could be a mechanic for splitting the shaft into two directions, where you move half of the uncovered deck into a separate pile? I'm afraid to break up the simplicity of the original idea, but maybe I'll explore this as an "expansion pack" eventually. Thanks for the suggestion and the detailed comment in general!

ditam 2021-05-03 22:04

Thanks for the stream @togis! It was a special treat to see my game played in 2 player mode. You guys always had a nice word and constructive criticism for every game you played, which made for a very wholesome atmosphere.

As for the card zoom issue (flagged by @togis and @nsadie and maybe others too), I agree that this needs to be added, and it's probably the top item on my list, but as a new feature it'll have to wait for a post-jam version after the rating period. The thing is, I would not like to slow down the game by switching to a two-click workflow for playing cards, so it would need to be a togglable setting, or maybe I'll just add a magnifying glass / info button with which you can select any card to view in full, but otherwise not change the game flow (this would also be the easiest to implement, so I'm biased :-p).

togis 2021-05-04 01:09

@ditam another option could eventually be to implement the zoom feature on right click.

Right click to zoom on the card, left to buy / use.

The right click could then work on any card, not only the ones on the store, but the one in your hand as well.

ditam 2021-05-04 08:04

@togis yeah, that seems straightforward enough, plus it can still live alongside other options.

cdunham 2021-05-12 02:06

Cool little compo game. Fits the theme well and has enough to the cards for the player to strategize. I only played against the AI, but I imagine playing versus an actual person is more fun. I didn't see some of the cards in the shop for some reason, like sieve and mine cart never showed up for me. It'd be nice if the player could buy any of the cards, and any amount of them, whenever they wanted. Other than that though the game was good!

ditam 2021-05-12 10:50

Thanks @cdunham!

It's very possible you didn't get to see all cards during a game - the shop always has Pickaxe and TNT cards, but the bottom 2 slots are re-filled with a random card when one is bought. (I imagine in a physical version these would be fixed size decks reshuffled before every game).

As for buying any card at any time, you could just keep buying TNT until you've exploded the whole shaft deck, and end the game on round 1 :) Making TNT cost something also wouldn't quite work, because having a 0-cost TNT ensures that you never get stuck in the shaft, which allows for fully randomized shafts - even though in the jam version the shaft deck is always the same.

jacic 2021-05-12 16:04

This is a pretty fun card game! Well done!

udo 2021-05-13 13:48

I liked playing this against the AI. Balancing-wise I got the impression that luck is the biggest factor, and the AI did seem to do pretty well by just playing random cards. I'm not sure I used the shop "correctly" as far as strategy is concerned, but forfeiting the entire turn for shopping seemed steep enough (more so than the money cost of the cards) to stick with the occasional TNT and Pickaxe replacement. Well done on the (CSS?) animations, this game is smooooth! I would have enjoyed a bit more theme-dependent graphical elements, but I loved how clean the UI is.

ditam 2021-05-13 17:12

Thanks @udo! Balancing is of course very tricky, and probably impossible to do properly during a Compo. Something to keep in mind about wasting turns is that when the mineshaft is blocked, both players get "free turns" shopping, until one of them decides to bust open the shaft again. This adds a bit of extra game theory-based strategy to it, that I saw in action a few times when watching 2 humans play against each other.

In general, I was very aware of the opportunity cost of shopping (hence the 0-cost cards), but I am thinking of lowering the money costs of the special cards further, to encourage people to use those more. Thanks for your detailed feedback!

The animations are mostly CSS indeed, only laid out cards (the revealed shaft and the hands) are positioned from JS, but even that could probably be solved with a CSS flexbox or two.

itsboats 2021-05-17 21:37

Really cool ideas and unique take on the theme! I like that it's 2 player but I wish I could have played with someone xD Really glad you added the AI too

here some of my suggestions if you plan on working on it more: -make cards in shop larger (just making each one larger when you hover over them could be effective) -Show the text of the cards in your hand (I think this might have been a choice for the 2 player mode). I think you could also just move the card upwards when you hover over it if you dont want to clutter the screen -Don't swap the cards around when playing against AI (I know for sure this was done for the 2 player mode xD) -I like the simple art style and colors, but the Player 1 and Mr AI text color is way too saturated/vibrant

(I read some of the comments about the zooming ideas, but I think just making them larger when you hover is one of the more practical solutions)

This would be an awesome game make a print and play PDF of to put on itch so people can play against each other IRL! If you change the Sabotage card wording a little bit, I think it could easily support more than 2 players and be a party game xD

ditam 2021-05-18 10:18

Thanks for the detailed feedback @itsboats! During development 2 player mode was my main focus, and the AI opponent was just an afterthought of practicality, so that other jammers can actually play and rate the game properly. As such, there is no real "1 player mode", the AI is just a drop-in actor for Player 2 -- sadly this does not result in the best UX for solo mode.

I'm a bit wary of adding hover-only effects, because I want to support mobile and touch UIs properly too. What I like about those ideas in other comments of opening a full-size, zoomed view of the cards is that it does not need to interfere with the regular gameplay UX, it can just be a button used by people learning the game. After a couple of games, seeing only the card titles should be sufficient, there's only 7 different cards to learn after all.

What do you have in mind for Sabotage in a 3 or 4 player mode? Destroying 1 card of each opponent feels a bit unintuitive/unnatural (ie. how do you use 1 unit of TNT to destroy multiple items in different mining camps?), destroying 1 card for each TNT discarded might be too weak (with a bit of over-simplification, say you can spend 3 turns' worth of TNT to set back 3 opponents by 1 turn each, is that good enough?). But yeah, I can see the former working OK.

I do plan on creating a print-and-play version eventually. When I do, I'll add it to both here and to the hosted version of the game, should you want to bookmark either :)