Foon →
Ludum Dare Explorer →
LD57 →
Marianas Miner
Marianas Miner
By coda-highland
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 578 | 3.35 | 26 | |
| Fun | 186 | 3.76 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 720 | 2.76 | 25 | |
| Theme | 261 | 3.95 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 587 | 3.34 | 24 | |
| Audio | 507 | 2.86 | 24 | |
| Humor | 554 | 2.52 | 24 | |
| Mood | 772 | 2.89 | 26 | |
Comments
It occurs to me after the fact: Maybe I should have had a separate high score list for LOWEST scores that escaped to the surface.
Taking your time to grind more points makes the game easier because of the extra lives. This was intentional: I wanted there to be a reward for drilling around in the depths of the map. It's also part of the game balance, because in the shallower waters it's easier for the Cephaloids to find you and the treasures aren't worth as much. It creates a small progression of difficulty through the game.
But what this ends up meaning is that more skilled players will actually have LOWER scores at the end. They'll need fewer lives to win, so there's less benefit in searching for treasure. The limited ammunition was intended to promote smart navigation and dexterous dodging, and the ammo refill when dying was intended as a mercy for players who get cornered. So that means players sprinting to the surface won't be engaging in as much combat to get points that way, either.
This means, in the end, I realize that my game mechanics work together to make a low-score competition an appealing way to play!
veztron
2025-04-09 02:48
Fun game! The drilling is satisfying. I like these balances: - running away creates a path for enemies to follow. Its stressful and forces you to come up with a strategy - Managing harpoon resources makes it so you need to explore sometimes
I really like how the harpoons pin the enemies to the wall. The pacing, movement, and controls are all solid. Would have loved to hear some atmospheric music or sound effects to really sell the location. Solid entry. :)
I love that you can shoot one harpoon and take out a whole line of them in 1 shot. That is really satisfying. Figuring out the best way to approach enemies to line them up adds some nice strategy.
milano23
2025-04-11 04:32
Fun and addicting game. Very easy to understand and to figure out as you play the game. Really good game design. I Had a lot of fun. Good job. marianasminer_highscores.png
rainbeau
2025-04-11 04:39
Excellent work! I really enjoyed plowing through the dirt as fast as that goes. Shooting the harpoon into a line of enemies is super satisfying. Honestly, all that's missing is an 8-bit soundtrack and you have yourself a proper game reminiscent of the flash game glory days. Nice.
@milano23 You were so close to beating it! Less than 400 feet away from the surface!
@rainbeau @trevor-lentz Yeah, I wanted to write some music for it but I ran out of time -- I had to switch game engines 24 hours into the jam, because at some point between LD54 and now, something changed out from under me and now my bespoke game engine that I've put hundreds of hours of work into has become annoyingly flickery and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
@veztron @tinykidtoo I'm glad you liked it. :) I intentionally made the enemy pathfinding work like that so you could set up moments to feel like you're awesome.
jtap
2025-04-11 18:24
Good game, especially liked the effect of the harpoon, pressing enemies to the wall. Not enough music, also could add improvements or temporary effects on the map. Thanks for this experience
martta
2025-04-14 09:18
This was nice. Almost got to the surface! The web version was quite laggy, so some optimizations would be needed in that regard (running on RTX 3080, AMD Ryze 9 and 32 Gb RAM). Also the respawning mechanic was quite frustrating, as 1 enemy could kill you multiple times without giving you any chance of fighting back if you were out of harpoons or just unlucky, and the lag did not help at all.
The graphics and sounds were nice and I really liked the fact that there were multiple "biomes" that you went through. It really adds so much that there is variety in the looks and level generation at each stage of the game. It really motivated me to keep going to see how the game changes the closer I got to the surface.
Nice game and I liked it! :-)
@jtap I would have loved to add music but I didn't have time. As for other improvements, I've had a few thoughts since submitting the game about things I could have done differently -- maybe having drilled blocks explode outward with a knockback effect, or adding a charge-up drill rush attack that you could use even if you don't have harpoons.
@martta What OS and web browser are you using? I didn't use anything fancy at all for graphics; under the hood there might be a frame of lag here or there as it generates new parts of the map (because trying to generate the whole thing at once was REALLY laggy) but I don't think that should have caused ongoing lag.
I tried to make respawning as user-friendly as possible by making the enemies run away from you when you die and by giving you a full refill on ammunition and a period of invulnerability, but... yeah, if you really get swarmed in a corner that might not be enough.
I enjoyed playing this. The simplicity of the gameplay seems to have allowed you to balance the game well. The amount of harpoons and lives offered an appropriate level of challenge. The changes in the tile-set communicated effectively that I should be travelling up, not down (I had assumed down at first, but thought again when reaching the boundary). I also thought you covered most of the main sounds required to communicate important information to the player. Enemies just off-screen, especially vertically, could be announced through sfx, as I was often surprised by them travelling down as I was travelling up, without time to react to their appearance. Music would have helped set the mood better, too. Overall, a good jam submission. Thanks for sharing this with us!
perrin
2025-04-16 09:04
The core loop here is fun and kept me playing, I think with more polish this could have been really great. It's a shame the drilling itself doesn't have more satisfying "juice" to it like some particle effects. Good game though.
nice little digger game here. I started going down as the theme is depth but then hit an artificial wall pretty fast, so ended up going upwards! :D I didn't realise the arrows were harpoons, but when I did it made a difference. Cool entry!
UPDATE! - My son saw me playing and wanted to try and he absolutely loves it! (he is 8) and "Killing the Martians with the spikes!" :D thank you!
Coool game! I almost got to the top but some alien jumped from the edge of the screen and got me! :laughing:
eugenik
2025-04-16 11:28
Good job! I love the artwork and music!.
@samuel-hollywood-summers Oh, indicating offscreen enemies is something I hadn't even thought about. Thanks for the feedback! That's a good idea.
@designernap That's heartwarming. :heart: I'm glad he enjoyed it! Maybe he can participate in a future game jam -- my son was 11 when he [made a game for LD42](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/running-out-of-space-3) and his game scored better than most of my games ever have!
@chuckeles Funny, I didn't code in any jump scares! :scream:
@eugenik @perrin I appreciate the feedback. :) I'll be sure to check your games out.
atsh
2025-04-17 04:26
Harpoon felt very powerful, loved it that you can hit multiple enemies at once
This was fun!!! Really fun! I enjoyed your game more than I expected to! It feels *natural* and the *digging* makes sense! Harpooning the guys was also very cool. Is the level proceduraly generated?
Good job, good job!
Now, what I would imagine would make it even cooler - goals to reach further depths? Maybe the further the depths the greater the amount of foes or sth?
Overall, very very enjoyable drilling game : ))
@atsh Glad you had fun!
@aweskybear Yep, I used simplex noise with a threshold based on depth to make caves that thin out as you approach the surface. Converting that into a tilemap with nice edges and corners was a challenge but fortunately it was a challenge I solved back in LD44 and converted into library code.
I wrote a [post-mortem](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/marianas-miner/marianas-miner-post-mortem) where I discuss how I handled the game balance. I actually realized I wanted the enemies to get more numerous as you went UP in order to have good game progression. But if I had achievements then I could easily imagine one for touching the bottom of the map or something.
@coda-highland Oh nice, deffo checking the post mortem : )))
Wait.. caves are thinning out UP? That is why I was feeling it got more spacey when going down - I wanted to go the deepest depths naturally. x)
Obviously I missed the description :smile: I will play again. xD
Okay, I escaped the depths. I would say it is a small well-balanced game that I enjoyed : ))
GJ
@aweskybear Thank you :)