The controls are very satisfying. Digging is very visceral and fun. However, I really had no idea what was going on on the right there.

I think maybe you really wanted to make a digging game, but you made it work, and you kept it on theme. The art is incredible (the wizard hat drill!) and the music is so crispy and crunchy good, and it works on mobile! Amazing.

I really liked how the digging felt! Sometimes going up felt a bit awkward, but besides that the control scheme was great.

This was weirdly addicting to me. The digging took a minute to get the flow but I ended up really enjoying constantly digging and checking to see whether if I needed to get a stage reset so I could farm some more items. I think you have a really cool concept here that I would love to see more of. Thanks for giving me the opportunity of playing your game!

Beautiful game submission!
This game really implemented the summoning theme well.
The soundtrack and art style worked well together together and were overall pleasing.
(Love the digging animation)

My only critic I can think of is maybe adding a bit more gameplay variety for digging as it can be a bit repetitive.

Awesome work!

Feels very finished. Satisfying controls. I didn't really understand what was happening in the tower window. How far away were I from losing? But other than that, great experience, and great tutorial in the beginning, for what might otherwise have been a confusing game.

Really polished entry with great art and sound!

The digging felt really nice with the little hat spin up and a bit of strategy in where to dig and what resources to go for. Little ghosts seemed to be the best thing to beeline for, always need more of them.

The tutorial at the beginning was very nice and went over all the mechanics well.

Only issue I saw was that the version embedded on the Ludum Dare website itself doesn't work, giving the following error
"Failed to read the 'serviceWorker' property from 'Navigator': Service worker is disabled because the context is sandboxed and lacks the 'allow-same-origin' flag."

Other than that, perfect!

@alex-mulkerrin what OS are you on? 'Cause I haven't had any problems with the Ludum Dare web version on Windows

@lightningst Windows 11 and using google chrome.

This entry has many things done right! Great overall feel and polish.

Interestingly, I found myself mostly paying attention to the left part of the screen. It was quite hard to try to keep track of different recipes and your resources. So, I mostly just focused on digging as efficiently as possible. I'm sure it would require more tactical approach if I wanted to survive longer. It is an interesting design problem when the player has to divide their attention to two seemingly separate parts of the game.

@nash I'm glad you liked it! One of my reasons for making the summoning automatic was so that at first you can just focus mining quickly, then as you get more skilled, you'll have time to strategize and learn the recipes.

This is quite addicting - and hard! I'll have to bookmark this to play some more later, since I don't think I've quite got the best strategy figured out.

@alex-mulkerrin

Should work on chrome now!!

This is surprisingly hard! I really love how it looks! This is a very interesting take on combining summoning, mining, tower defense, and crafting (crafting minions?) in my opinion! At first it feels kinda hard to keep track and juggle between mining, tower defense combat and keeping track of what ingredients do I need to summon minions.

The game feels polished and has a very nice amount of juice! Mining feels very satisfying!

Really want to play this game again. Great game!

@altaf-creator thank you! I spent forever trying to find that balance of juice, but without giving anybody a seizure XD. It makes me happy to hear you enjoyed it!

Really impressed with the art style and sound design. This takes me back to my early gaming days. Very polished and fun entry. In the beginning there is a bit much going on but once you figure everything out its very fun!

Great entry, love the juciness!
I wanted to have almost the exact little passive tower defense combat in my game, but then I decided to rescope. Impressive, what you managed to achieve in such little time!

Sweet, animations and movement feels on point and the music is cool (altough the loop might be too short if you are doing decently in the game and surviving).

Not much else to say, so here is my score:



This is very polished! I really like the art style, though it does make it hard to identify some of the monster parts from time to time. The digging animation and the screen shake really ties the mining mechanic all together. Also: the music is banger. Good job!

Really enjoyed this!! Fun mechanics and more juice that a GMO watermelon!! Love the sound design :)

The Good:
- Really fun mechanics
- Love the graphics! Big fan of the minimalism while still being clear and readable
- good sound design
- So much juice! Especially love the way the screen shakes when you hit things.

The Not So Good:
- Took me a round of dying to understand what was going on in the upper right. It's intuitive once I got a grasp on it, but there might be a better way to tutorialize it.
- Holy shit did it feel like the difficulty ramped up in the end game. Maybe a smoother difficulty curve so you don't go from dominating to dead as quickly

Design notes:
- Sometimes I would hold down just a little too long and dig one layer deeper than I wanted, which then meant I missed out on doing a row of resources easily. Not sure how I would fix this, the inability to dig while flying feels good and intentional, but the occasional mishap like that did feel bad.

TL;DR
Really loved this, played through like four times. Super fun gameplay, great aesthetics, my only real gripe is it felt like the difficulty curve could use some tweaking. Great job!

@iellswo yeah, before this game I didn't realize how hard a difficulty curve can be to make! In the future I'd like to add some more variation in the ingredient spawns instead of just increasing the ore and enemies.

I also really love the evolution system and ranged enemies in games like Age of War 2, and I would love to implement those as well. Though if I make the battling more complicated, I'll probably need to give it a bigger focus on the screen.

I really appreciate the detailed feedback :)

I see someone was ready for a few different themes ;)

There were so many different cool mechanics working together here. I loved how the digging was it's own kind of puzzle (since you couldn't dig up). One suggestion would be a way to know what level I'm on, or some indication of where the difficulty curve is at (although I couldn't tell if the difficulty actually changed or not).

My score second try:


The UI is a bit too busy for beginner but it takes around 5 secs to know where I must do the job and I spend around 30 mins for this game! Really additive!!!!!! AND LOVE IT SO MUCHHH!!!!!!!

This is so good! It might not have the most amazing or fun gameplay, but everything about it just works. From the the art style to the sounds and the music, it all fits together perfectly into a complete game.

The digging animation and effects are so satisfying! I really struggled to plan out where/how to dig and also pay attention to the top right. That said the digging was fun enough to keep me interested!

Love the art style and the tower defense/mining mashup. Quite original!

Fun mix of game mechanics! The mining mechanics were very satisfying and there was a bit of strategy around what was summoned. I did feel a bit disconnected from the actual tower defense though, since all I could do was keep mining as fast as I can until I die. Also the player gets a bit harder to see lower down in the world. I liked the graphics otherwise, and the music track was nice!

Interesting take on dig dug! It was hard to keep track of what was happening in my castle, and I found myself just digging as fast as possible

Awesome game! The controls and navigation felt really good. The sound and artwork was super consistent! The tutorial was very well put together! I'm not sure if dividing the attention between the digging and tower worked for me, but maybe it works for most people.

Congrats on the entry!

My best run clocked out at 6375:


My final strategy was to have two phases to my digging, first I go for all the resources to summon minions, then in the second phase, I'd collect the ores and hope for the best that I have enough minions to protect me. Which worked great! Until they overwhelmed me, but alas, I held out.

Very fun game! You really get into the collecting for the summoning. I think breaking it up into different screens and resetting them rather frequently also helped keep a good game speed going, I think that was a cool decision. I also felt that having two objectives (getting resources/getting ores) also really expanded the decisions you have to take as the player, that really expanded the strategies you could go for that was great. The monochrome art worked well, along with the chiptune music, I think that was a good art style pick. Great job with this game!

Super cool game! I love the novel take on the sort of combining different ingredients to summon things mechanic. There are so many great bits of polish in here as well like the way the inventory is presented. I'm always impressed with anyone who can make something look good with such a limited colour palette as well!

A very original game, the tutorial helps a lot and the graphics and sound are amazing! GG

Wow! Super interesting concept, very well implemented mechanics, feels like a really polished game. Good job on the entry!

It looks like an authentic retro game with its visual style and music. I like the layout of the elements. Gameplay is quite novel and engaging. Good job!

Really addictive game. Cool concept. I did not like that you have to keep down pressed a little bit before it mines, but then it repeats mining fast. However this is not really breaking. I like the aesthetic but would have preferred colored graphics. Anyway, good job