Amusing little game, a bit hard though. I like the death sound, it gives a nice personal touch.

The game crashed quite frequently on the instructions screen on my Mac (the console spewed out a lot, so I'm not really sure where a useful error would be).

The concept was pretty original, but I think it would have benefited if you could move diagonally.

I've put up a new version that shouldn't "blow the stack". Just changed a recursive call to an iterative one. :) I put up the new version at http://www.msynet.com/files/ld22/ld22-2.zip

Thanks for the feedback!

WOW at the idea! With more variation, this could become really good! :D

Won't start for me :(

What platform? Any errors on the console?

A shell script for Linux would be exactly the same with the library directory changed.

For some reason, if I leave the instructions screen up for a few seconds before pressing space, it quits with:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StackOverflowError
at sun.misc.Unsafe.compareAndSwapLong(Native Method)
at java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicLong.compareAndSet(AtomicLong.java:149)
at java.util.Random.next(Random.java:183)
at java.util.Random.nextFloat(Random.java:395)
at com.msynet.ld22.Entity.update(Entity.java:44)
at com.msynet.ld22.Miner.update(Miner.java:41)
at com.msynet.ld22.Entity.update(Entity.java:45)
[...]
at com.msynet.ld22.Miner.update(Miner.java:41)
at com.msynet.ld22.Entity.update(Entity.java:45)
at com.msynet.ld22.Miner.update(Miner.java:41)
AL lib: ReleaseALC: 1 device not closed

If I press space quickly, it works.

It took me a while to understand what I was doing, and why the miners were going black, and how to open chests, but after I did, I enjoyed one game, then it became far too easy. I think this would work better as a multiplayer game.

Oh, and diagonal movement is important, as mentioned already.

*exactly the same as for OS X