Really fun, great concept!

Cool idea, I liked it

This is the best game I've played so far this ludum dare! It's a simple concept but then goes super far. It definitely has the opportunity for slight speedrunning since if you get misaligned you can go off in seemingly unintended directions, but at the same time every time I went somewhere I would wind up in a cave, it was sorta like "I feel like I'm so off the path they can't have planned for _this_" and then it turns out you folks did XD. Lots of fun, I feel like I must have missed some of the game but I made it to the ending. Very cute, good concept, concise, nice work!

Web build didn't work for me so I had to download the .zip but I'm playing on firefox so maybe that's why.

The game is very pleasant to control and has a charming style! Keep it up!

I loved the game, some of the puzzles were very hard and that's what made it fun, I also love the different mechanics like the metal.

I wall climbed from the second metal floor up to the top of the yellow ? is that normal ?

I am collecting compo game that use github to host their source,

I have starred and added your repository to a list of ld57 compo :https://github.com/stars/dhmmasson/lists/ludum-dare-57-compo

I have created badges for the readme that you can use:
```
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Consider using these **topics** to make your Ludum Dare entry more discoverable:
- `game`
- `game-development`
- `ludum-dare`
- `ludumdare`
- `ludumdare57`
- `ludum-dare-57`
- `ld57

@jordanfb Thanks for the feedback, it's intended that you can reach certain places early or out-of-order if you try to break it. I tried to design it so that the easiest/most obvious path showed all the content, but tried to leave it open for finding skips.

@dhim I intentionally didn't box in the areas too much so if you try to you can probably find unintended paths or places you can get to. If you really know what you're doing I'm pretty sure you can skip some areas pretty much completely. Thanks for the tips about github too.

The level design here is really, really excellent! I love how all the areas interconnect, it feels like a proper puzzle adventure game. It does a great job tutorializing (like learning how to manage jump height). The mechanics extend really well, you can figure out ways to skip earlier levels from mechanics you learn later in the game. And the art and colors are lovely, especially the final descent at the end through all the level colors.

Honestly don't have any negative feedback, probably one of my favorites so far this jam!

This is a really cool concept! I love the central mechanic, there were a couple of spots where I got stuck in a loop, I maybe with there was a way to hop out without going to high up/down and continuing to dig past the area you were trying to go, but it is a ton of fun and I especially love bouncing off of the metal bits. Music would've gone a long way, but the sound effects are nice. Graphics are great I love Drilly (awesome guy.

@sudocoffee Thanks! I'm not the happiest with the level design at the start, but once I got the building the purple underground area with lava I think I got the hang of it and I'm pretty happy with everything past that point.

@tad-i-guess Thanks for the feedback. I really wanted to get music in but just didn't have time, with being busy for most of the Saturday with other stuff. Originally I wanted to design the level so that it was impossible to get stuck, but it turned out to limit the puzzles quite a bit, especially with the physics being not quite perfect - adding the restart (R key) button helped quite a bit.

I'm not even done with this one and I know I'm giving it 5s across. It's incredibly good. The movement mechanics are great, the level design is fun to explore, the presentation is super charming.

The only thing I can nitpick about this is that it's particularly hard to jump over lava floor without accidentally touching it, there should be some built in leeway when doing so, it gets frustrating.

5 star game for the digging mechanics honestly. Unfortunately I'm stuck in the purpur zone. I wonder if I sequence broke the puzzles and entered some part of the map backwards there, no idea where to proceed from there. Could use some direction to the next objective. Also, it seems like landing on a corner from an upwards jump prevents digging. This was frustrating at times.

Had a fun time with this! Not especially difficult - I think the game could really have done with some more challenging puzzles toward the end, though it did at least try with the more vertical pink section - but quite enjoyable. The low difficulty also makes sense for a jam game, to allow more people to fully experience it in a shorter amount of time. Good development of the mechanics as the game progressed. I enjoyed the more involved puzzle rooms toward the end of the game. The ending itself was well-executed, though I'll admit I was worried for a second when passing through the first checkpoint flag on my way to the final room. _Really_ could have done with some music, though I understand being a compo game would have made that more difficult to accomplish.

Some critiques:
- Not a huge fan of being able to slope off of corners. I know some people do this on purpose to add lenience to the controls, but personally I find it works _against_ me more often than not, and just makes the game more frustrating. Where tiles are involved, I just want a plain rectangle collider.
- Being able to drill into the side of a wall feels awkward to me. It's never necessary in the actual levels and as such serves no purpose.
- The upper pink section had some extraneous metal blocks that misled me as to what I was supposed to do to progress. Falling down to the grassy section previously had meant failure, so it felt counterintuitive to suddenly _have_ to do that.
- Speaking of falling down to the grassy section... I didn't love that being the main method of failure in that part of the game. It's possible you could forget to reset and accidentally hit a flag, and then you'd have to play a whole chunk of the game over again, which would not be fun.

This game reminded me of Leap Year by Daniel Linssen in some ways. If you haven't played that game probably don't read the following section, and go play it because it's really good! Considering you made this game, and Leap Year has some similar design sensibilities, I think you'd enjoy it.

!> The main mechanic of this game is very similar to the drilling in Leap Year. That game gives you horizontal control while drilling and does not let you drill upward, but the basics are the same, and the puzzle design is also extremely. The simple, slightly wobbly hand-drawn art style is also very reminiscent. Not sure if there was any inspiration there, but I had fun either way, and this game develops the drill mechanic further to create some interesting puzzles. Beyond the drill mechanic, both games have a similar style of progressing through a screen-based map and revisiting rooms as you go, which is a format I quite enjoy.

Good stuff! I think I cheesed the last section by accidentally clipping a corner I wasn't supposed to and getting up to the ending section a bit early, but I'm not complaining XD


This game is clever! Without that much explaination, the player will *see* and *experience* what mechanics are there to help. Also, the puzzles are really fun and seem to be well polished too! That is impressive for a compogame.

Somehow the game feels also satisfying. The graphics , transitions, soundeffects , everything fits together very nicely.

Very cool concept, had loads of fun exploring. I think the graphical style really suited this game as well. Fantastic compo entry. I don't know how intentional being able to accidentally trip older checkpoints was as a design decision, I had mixed feelings about that!

I didn't manage to finish bc I wanna try some other games but this is one I hope to get back to and play to the end. Especially with only 24 hours the level design and concept is super solid. Definitely some rage-game elements with missing a jump and then ending up drilling upwards into the starting flag and being set back to the beginning lol. Really fun, great job!

@gargantuan-janitor Thanks! Yeah, I really should've used a separate collider for detecting lava.

@sypiac Yeah I'm not really sure why that prevents digging - I noticed it once during playtesting before submission but didn't have the time to figure out what causes that bug.

@python-b5 Thanks for such detailed feedback! I agree about bouncing off corners - the main reason I used a circle collider is so I didn't have to deal with rotating the collider - originally the player would drill in whatever direction you entered the ground at but it was almost impossible do design levels around. Drilling into walls is an unintended side-effect of reusing the code for that old version. Also, yes, leap year was a pretty big inspiration - I'd not really seen that kind of puzzle-platforming before it so wanted to try and make something similar myself.

@liam Originally I'd intended for it to be somewhat more open-world, with collectibles, so re-tripping older checkpoints made a lot more sense then, but I didn't get around to fixing it once I decided to make it more linear.

I might make a post-jam version at some point with some music and bugfixes/adjustments based on all of this feedback.

What a cool idea!
The controls felt good. The base mechanic with the drill felt very satisfying due to the smooth controls and the good sound effects.

There was a part, where the lava touches the ground floor. The collision felt a little bit off for me while I'll tried to jump above it and died several times at this part. Adding a speedrun timer to the game would be a nice feature.

The walking animation of the main character is cute and the graphic style is simplistic, but it looks good and coherent. The level design was very good, too. Really had fun playing this game. :)

Brilliant mechanic! I grasped it pretty quickly since I've played Leap Year. But this is a classic case of "easy to learn, hard to master". You could turn this into an amazing full-scale game! Great entry

It's a super interesting concept with lots of room for speedrunning potential, it was a lot more difficult than I was first giving it credit for! A bit buggy at times but when it played well it played very well. Drilly is super cute despite the rest of the art kind of lacking, the simplicity works well for the overall style however, well done!

Hi! Your game idea is amazing. The game mechanics are easy to understand and allow for creating very interesting puzzles. I also really like the minimalist art style.

Cool! Nice little Metroidvania-ish puzzle platformer. The art really reminded me of An Untitled Story (from Maddy Thorson). The core idea was simple and there was quite a lot of content to explore.

In terms of level design, sometimes it wasn't very clear which direction I should be heading and needed to "brute force" a bit to see where there different exits might lead. I tried a couple of times to cross the big gap in the pink area above the start but couldn't, until I found out that just falling down leads to an area I hadn't been to before. Some *subtle* way to lead the player might help here.

What also didn't help was that sometimes the mechanics felt just a liiitle buggy. For example, exiting the ground close to a wall is a little janky: Drilly kind of drill a bit into the (vertical) wall, boosting my exit jump, but I don't think that's intentional? I also couldn't always tell whether my drilling would continue or not. I guess it all comes down to how many blocks there are between the ground and the ceiling (or vice versa), but it was very much vibe-based.

I got to the end and had fun with this, good job!

This is really nice, loved that your ability becomes a hindrance as much as a benefit and so the puzzles become around not trigger your ability when you don't want it to go off. Super interesting.

Cute art and very clever mechanics! This game is huge, especially considering it's a compo entry! Also, drilling towards unwanted flags is scary lol