oxnh 2025-04-07 09:22
A bit tedious. I wish there was some invulnerability after you get hit, because you can die super quickly. Could just be a skill issue cause I'm choosing bad upgrades.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Selective Drilling
By xwilarg
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 236 | 3.10 | 22 | |
| Fun | 202 | 3.07 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 255 | 2.70 | 22 | |
| Theme | 132 | 3.65 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 255 | 2.85 | 22 | |
| Audio | 215 | 2.65 | 22 | |
| Mood | 194 | 3.20 | 22 |
A bit tedious. I wish there was some invulnerability after you get hit, because you can die super quickly. Could just be a skill issue cause I'm choosing bad upgrades.
Thanks for your comment :) There is a small invulnerability but it's quite short so maybe I should have made it a big longer
Cool game, there is always something fun about a game involving drilling. Controlling how far I would go with each drill took a while to get the hang of, the way that it pushes the character forward is a little strange. Maybe if the highlights also showed tiles beyond the first layer it would have been more clear? I found the combat part of the game a bit tricky, sometimes it felt like the drill dash would push me forward just enough that I would take damage but not hit the enemies. I did like the way the map generation worked, the different caverns of enemies worked well for your game and the theme. Overall well done!
I got ending 2. The gameplay was enjoyable. I really liked the different enemy behaviours. The teleporting enemies were definitely the hardest. I found the strategy of just dig straight down and eventually you'll get somewhere to work well, but when jumping down the enormous hole I had dug, the camera couldn't keep up with the player, making it hard not to die to the enemies waiting down below. Got there eventually though, haha! Great job!
This is a cool concept! I really like the diving down and coming back up to spend your coin on things! I have a couple of things of feedback for the game, and I hope it can help if you decide to work on it more:
-The drill overheat mechanic is tricky, since the player has nothing they can do while they wait for it to cool down. Makes fighting enemies hard, as well as when you are mining you just have to wait. Possible ideas could be to have drills have durability and you have to buy new ones, or the overheat cool down could be quicker, or maybe the player could have a shield bubble while their drill is cooling down. Also I think maybe the overheat sprite for the drill could pops out more for visual clarity. -Idea for the Overheat: Maybe drilling takes more time per block, but the overheat charges up if you drill, and if you stop drilling, it will start cooling. But if the overheat meter reaches too high, then you have to wait for it to cool all the way down. Then this creates the mastery challenge of drilling then waiting in shorter bursts, and if they reach max, then they have to wait longer for it to cool down back to 0. The player then has full control over the mechanic, and there can be a bit more mastery to it! -Jump and gravity is really high. Makes it a bit tricky to move around and navigate the game, especially when fighting enemies. I would just balance it a bit more. You want it to be low enough so the player can process when they are in air and figure out where they are going to land. -Visual player feedback is incredibly important, and I think you have a lot of places here to play around with it. I would give hitflashes, particles, screenshake, and various things that would help indicate when I'm getting hit, and when something else is hit. Also death animation (even if a single static frame) and waiting in place before teleporting back will help the player to process why they died and what from. -I think the invulnerability frames are also really short. Longer period to be invulnerable after being attacked would be great! You generally want it to be larger for player, and almost none for enemies. Always good to skew towards giving the player more power than the enemies, but this can vary by game. -I really like the gameplay flow and the recall animation and particles! I think those style of particles could be cool for when things are hit.
Overall great job! You have a really strong core for the game, and I hope the feedback helps!
I was very quickly punished for breaking the cardinal rule of life: never drill straight down lol. But yeah, solid mechanics, and had me trying again and again to go deeper. Definitely fits the theme. Great work!
player progression feels great. loved getting the upgrades to go from slow and tedious drilling to a drilling machine by the end. great job! it did take me a bit to see the cooldown of the drill being represented by the drill color at the beginning.
Nice work getting something this complicated done in such a short time! I managed to find one of the endings (Escape). These digging games always have such an addictive game loop. It was interesting that you tried something different with the drill that cools down and takes you multiple blocks per "swing"--not sure it _totally_ worked, but it was different and I appreciated that. And I think it was a wise choice to not penalize the player for dying. Had a fun time buying upgrades and digging down over and over.
Thanks for all your reviews! Lot of great advices and overall I'm super glad the general feeling seem to be positive!
@smilewood Showing digging hint on more than the first layer would definitely have been a great idea, keeping that in mind for my next game!
@phlip45 I should indeed have put a limit to how much the camera could have lag behind (especially since it was to be expected that people would make a bit straight hole under their feet :p)
@straightupgruntled Thanks for all your great ideas, durability system is something I wanted to avoid (overall I wanted to avoid player having to loose progression) but overall I agree with your others points about visual and drilling mechanisms!
@jared-saizdelamora Glad you liked it!
@spexxilove After making things I always forget a bit that things aren't obvious for someone that never played the game, will try to make visual cues better next time!
@polymathld I really wanted to make the drill both a tool and to be used as to "charge" enemies, I'm glad you liked the "overall" idea of it and well for the implementation, I'll definitely try to spend more time on it next time since it was the core mechanism!
Thanks again for playing my game!
I found drilling straight down on the sides to be a winning strategy for one of the endings (escape) as it limits how many angles you have to worry about attacks from.
One thing that would be useful (as someone who dug their starting hole right at spawn) is to either increase the range of indestructible tiles around spawn/the vendor or have a lockout on the controls for a few seconds after spawning. I'd often die in combat and still be pressing buttons when I spawned back in, which resulted in launching myself straight back down into the pit with no chance to interact with the vendor, or digging out more holes making more ways to fall in at spawn.
Not sure if I can say anything new what hasn't been said above, so, I will just say that I enjoy the premise that I don't need to worry about dying. Makes me take more risky approach (and it is also good, since it's easy to die very quickly). Fun to play though, well done!
Pretty fun! Starts out slow, but gets to be pretty cool once you start getting the upgrades and the gameplay starts to shine. My only slight negative is the sound for the drill, it's pretty loud and once you get the upgrades to use it faster it starts to be a little annoying. Fun game overall though.
Cute visuals :)
Good solution with upgrades. I think start gameplay could have been a little bit faster.
Cool game, I liked the art style, it was really fun to dash around, although the dash got a bit fast making it hard to control since the camera wasn't always able to keep up. It would be nice to have a cooldown on being hit, even with 5 hearts falling into a room I got oneshoted at one point and had to preemptively try to kill some enemies while going down, because of the drill I would sometimes take damage when attacking and killing the enemy, sometimes the drill didn't clear as much as I'd want, even with the size upgrade, when going horizontally the character takes two squares and unless you position your mouse right in the middle of the two you would only get one of them and not drill vertically at all since you get blocked.
A fun and solid entry, very well done ! I especially loved the multiple endings mechanic which surely isn't common in these types of games. Made me want to play again after getting the second one, especially since you cleverly decided not to design dying as something punishing. Great job :v:
Always good to see some upgrade elements in a jam game, especially such a short one. A bit more clarity on when I could drill would be nice, and the sound was a little bit grating. But I get what you were going for and you did a good job getting there!
I played the game two times but wasn't able to see the first ending. The game is fun. The fact that you don't really loose anything on dying balances the game well as the first enemies are hardcore when you have no life. I also found the secret island to change the skin. How do you get to the main ending?
Thanks for your comments :)
@houmgaor There are 3 endings you can get, the shopkeeper have different dialogues when you get close, depending of your progression
The first one is when you kill everyone, the second one when you have some enemies left
The last one is a bit more tricky, if you look closely some enemies have red eyes and some don't (an example is the 3rd screenshot uploaded above), to get the last one you need to kill all red enemies and spare most of the "normal" ones