Very cool, kinda reminds me of dwarf fortress

Nice game. I really like the dwarf sprite animations.
Managed to get all the bugs you mentioned in the description, also it seems you don't actually need mithril to mine dark stone, and the upgrade button tooltip is empty.

@someone Are you referring to the dark redish stone that's found deeper down? From the way I made the game you should be able to mine dark stone with iron, and hard stone needs mythril.

As for the other bugs, i managed to squash a good chunk of them in my version, so i'll be pushing out a patch when I finish up with that.

I don't know if I understood correctly how the game works....but it doesn't matter, because I enjoyed it quite a bit! :D The blue pylons were straight forward, but the green ones...well...I don't realy know how do you meant...but it worked.
After I upgraded the forge for the second time, I felt like my goals ran out. Too bad there was nothing more content, but I know you didn't have time for more.
The animation was great too! Good game, thanks!

I've enjoyed the aesthetics and sound of the game. Missing a bit more feedback on player inputs and things happening - like a placement sound, buy sound, or even dwarf sounds for that little extra oomph. The pylons are an interesting take on controlling the dwarfs - it could be interesting to see if somehow adding different pylons that require different mats could add a bit more depth to the game (pun not intended).

I meant the darker grey stone that says it requires mithril. Fairly sure I could dig into that before I acquired any.
It would also be helpful to have information on your dwarves somewhere on screen, perhaps numbers of dwarves for each type of equipment.
I imagine the disappearing dwarves all got eaten by a balrog or some other terrors of the deeps.

cool game, I love the music!

@lelek-hunor-kadosa
The Green and Blue pylons are functionally similar in every way except the green ones let dwarfs mine and the blue ones don't. For the ludum dare having the blue pylon is redundant since there's little reason to not use a blue one which is why is costs less.

Content wise there's alot of places i can go with this. Just a few idea I had was having a pop cap based on housing (which largely wouldn't limit how many dwarfs you have, just slow you down) where houses could be built in the tunnels. The other one was having multiple mines with different resources to mine in them.

@nidzakornjaca
Ya, I was pretty strapped for time when my hard drive crashed Monday and forced me to move all the game files. I would of loved to of added them since it sort of bothers me as well sometimes.

@someone Ya that's a bug, I can't seem to replicate it though.

This was really cool, but I'm not sure I quite understood the mechanics. I eventually just started placing jobs down randomly and that seemed to work ok.

I got a nice Lemmings vibe from this game. Would definitely play an extended version with more player feedback. Great work!

@andrewkennedy
Good to know, if I get more time I'll implement a few techniques from my previous Ludum Dare. I tend to be more of a fan of showing rather then telling in my tutorials. I will say I was a bit nervous about that since it a lot of the mechanics were not that mainstream.

@wolfier That's what I understood:
In the green rectangles they see the ores, and in the red ones they don't, right?

Content wise I would like something really expensive but really usefull thing. Because from mid game you have more gold then you can spend.

The HUD needs more info, for example a dwarf counter. And the cost of things should be always visible (Yhea I know I can check the cost if I hover my mouse on it, but it's clunky and I forget the amount fast)....oh yes, the mouse....I can't leave it anywhere without it shows some info.
And a zoom out or minimap would be nice too.

Are you planning to continue the game? Because if you make a major content update I would like to replay it. Don't forget to notify me in that case, thanks! :D

Just tried the updated version. The dwarf count is a nice addition.
Reproduced that bug again for you. Seems consistent with this setup.

@lelek-hunor-kadosa

Yup that's how it works

I do plan on continuing the game, but I wouldn't expect anything big since it's currently the week before finals week.

I do plan on redesigning the icons to allow for more buildings and doing some balance changes so gold doesn't expire as a resource so quickly.

I did have a plan to implement a toggle off for the tooltips, but time killed that plan.

As for a minimap or zoom, it will probably take a bit to do either since for a zoom i'd need to find resolutions that don't murder all the pixels. A minimap might be more in the cards but it could also end up being computationally expensive, we shall see.

@someone

Thanks for that image, i'll try it out and see if i can get it to happen.

I liked this game and I think it represents some good work considering the constraints!

I would like to have seen a way to address pathing issues (like if I could slap stuck dwarves to reset them if I noticed them). Additionally, it would be nice to have some sort of end goal after unlocking mithril.

@skoobydoo

There technically is an end gold in the form of a giant gold hoard at the bottom right of the map, but since I never got to add an end screen it doesn't matter that much.

Were you playing the Ludum Dare version? I believe I fixed that in the post version.

loved it! i hope you'll be able to expand it at some point! well done!

Loved it also! Well worth expanding

Liked it. The music was great.

Played your game after you left a comment on our game, and enjoy the manager-able approach to dwarves mining. Congrats on the game, especially as a solo-dev.

@defilerzero Thanks for playing, i bet our games will be much more different from each other if we keep working on thme

Diggy diggy hole

really impressive game for such a short jam! well-executed core gameplay loop. would love to see this developed into a bigger project. one thing that wasnt super clear was figuring out exactly how the various pylons were intended to work. or was there any reason to not just only use the green ones besides that they were trivially more expensive?

Very good I liked it

Really impressive and cool game ^^ I really had fun playing it :) unfortunately it crashed and I don't really know why :/ I liked the music and graphics and the mechanics were pretty cool. I loved watching my dwarfs mine and the pylon system was pretty unique. Good job :)
This is the crash code btw in case it helps:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object obj_Dwarf:

Unable to find instance for object index 134206
at gml_Object_obj_Dwarf_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_Dwarf_Step_0 (line -1)

So I dont really know about this game. There is a lot i love about it but there are some things that don`t seem to work or confuse me.

+ The concept is great! I love the idea of a lot of dwarfs just run around the mine and collect resources to upgrade.
+ The animations and the graphics are great and look good. Seems like you got a lot out of the low resolution with your art. Very Nice
(+ Music is very nice)

- I don't get how the pilons and pathfinding work. My dwarfs seem to run where they want anyways. The green mining pilons do seem to work because the dwarfs only mine there. Another example for this was: later in the game when in needed more dwarfs deeper i recruited a lot more and most of them just run into the first mineshaft (although there are already enough dwarfs mining the gold) and back to the surface. So it seems I had to wait until some dwarfs acidentially find the way down.
So there should be more feedback or more explanation ingame to that and maybe some polishing of the pathfinding.
- As a result it takes too much time to get the dwarfs to clear out certain passages.
- I don't know what benefits the upgrade of the "main building" on the surface gets me.
- The tooltips are often rendered behind the buttons so i can't read all of it.

So don't get me wrong. I really dig the concept (pun intended) and would love to play a more polished version.
I hope my feedback helps.

@drskort

That dumb bug is so annoying, I can't recreate it myself for some reason and game maker reporting line -1 makes really difficult to figure out where its firing at. My theory is that it has something to do with deleting pylons and a dwarf trying to get information for said such a pylon on the same frame or the frame after it deletes itself.

I'm glad you liked the game despite the crash, I've seen it enough times now in other peoples playthroughs to know I need to fix it.

@hugison

So the way the dwarfs path through the mine is that if they are carrying something they are more likely to go upwards then other directions, if they aren't carry anything (new dwarfs don't carry anything) they are more likely to go down.

The other thing is that when they reach a pylons they will roll a dice on whether they want to stop there and look for something to dig out or if just try to do the movement I described above. If they choose to dig they can move any direction afterwards, if they don't they can't choose to backtrack.

tl/dr Its a bunch of weighted die rolls.

The best advice I can give is to just connect your tunnels together. There is a few places where you can take advantage of the AI and stockpiles to basically get a group of dwarfs to mine the same nodes endlessly.

Its definitely in the cards to explain the AI's weighted dice so players can take advantage of it optimally (especially since i have plans for adding more weights in the future).

____________________________________________________________________________________

The forge allows you to upgrade dwarfs tools using iron or mithril, there should be a tooltip in game for it and it's is also explained somewhat on this page. Whether i explained it well or not is up to you I guess

Also i fixed the layering on the tooltips for the post ludum dare version, I do recommend playing both.

Anyways, ya I plan to add way more tutorial stuff for the future. It's quite clear that the game needs it since apparently I only make overly complex games.

I too had this dreaded error:


>ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event1
for object MiningIcon:
Variable MiningIcon.ClearTimer(100135, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_MiningIcon_Step_1
gml_Object_MiningIcon_Step_1 (line -1)


It happened when placing what I think you refer to as a pylon? Either way I booted it back up and played some more. I think your thought process here is very unique. The fundamental idea isn't that new per se, but the direction you seem to be going with it is very exciting. Generally I think there's an insane amount of potential with this, and I for enjoy the visuals. I wouldn't say this was overly complex, but I sure would like if you took it to a place that was haha. I'm glad to hear you're going to keep working on it. I can't wait to see where you take it!

@threeli
Oh that's a completely different -1 error. Though based on the fact it actually contains a variable name and not just void I do know what this bug is. Its based on when you try to place a pylon on ore which was an oversight when writing the code as i forgot to stop the player from doing that since the ores don't have any clear timers assigned to them.

I'm definitely happy to hear people are enjoying this despite my ineptitude at writing tutorial.

@wolfier

Thanks for clarifying. I will definitely give it another try.

And yes. Some more in game tutorial would be nice. As difficult as it is to do without just a wall of text for such a complex mechanic.
As far as I understand the mechanic now this is really interesting and I am curious, what you can achieve with it in the future.

Reminds me of Lemmings a lot. The gameplay is REALLY FUN! I also like the graphics, especially the animations of those little guys. Very cool game mate!

Very nice game! I was hooked for at least an hour until I created waaaay to many dwarves and FSP started to dip a bit.
Loved the music, it's perfect to be chilling and mining.
Great job!

@necdilzor

Nice, I was hoping someone else would melt their computer with dwarfs.

I really like this entry. The only reason I stopped playing when I did is I got the error at the bottom of this comment. The music is well done and I love the visual style. I found the pylons a bit tricky at first but got the hang of it. Great Job! :)
___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event1
for object MiningIcon:

Variable MiningIcon.ClearTimer(100130, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_MiningIcon_Step_1
############################################################################################
gml_Object_MiningIcon_Step_1 (line -1)

This game is really fun, good job! Really unique spin on the theme and just plain fun. Good job :D.

Really interesting idea! I struggled quite a bit to get dwarves to actually go where I wanted, I'm not sure if it was me not understanding how the pylons worked or if it was just me getting unreasonably unlucky with random dwarf logic but there were a lot of situations where the deeper my mine was the less dwarves would end up navigating that way and when it came to digging new tunnels and placing new pylons sometimes dwarves just wouldn't ever walk over to the new pylon spot and i'd have to dig another tunnel to the same place. Other than pathing issues though I quite enjoyed it! It gave me lemming vibes which I liked! A good entry, well done!

What a fun little mining game! Using the pylons to show the dwarves where to go is a neat mechanic.

Thankfully no bugs to report, even when I was playing the original Jam version.

@flatgub

In terms of getting deeper in the mine, if your not using stockpiles it gets a lot harder to send the dwarfs deeper because they will keep filling their backpacks and heading upwards. If you dug a giant straight tunnel downwards and potentially some branches off the side with no ore on the main path they could easily reach the bottom.

This isn't currently explained but I did finish working on some tutorial prompts that do tell you how the dwarfs move.

This was super addictive reminded me of my time playing Motherlode back in the day, really wanted to keep digging deeper and deeper. There's a progression system similar to that game that really pushes the player to go further, discover the next ressource type, upgrade etc... Shame I kept of running into the same type of crashes as the other players.

Learning the game is a bit rough at first but there aren't too many elements to get a handle on. Managing dwarves become fairly easy once I understood the logic. Slightly shorter delay on the apperance of the tooltips would be good, especially since it's the only tutorial you get in-game.

Artstyle is really clear and nicely stylized though the color of the stockpile is a very similar color to the dirt background.

This is a quite an ambitious simulation-type game and it works quite well. Very well done.

What a blast! This was a load of fun, and it's awesome you made something so ambitious, I did have to deal with a couple crashes, and the dwarf behaviour was sometimes difficult to understand, but I still had a load of fun. Well done!

Cool game! It took me a little bit to understand how the pylons worked, but once I did, I had a lot of fun!

-Fun: (4)
Besides some bugs & glitches and a "high" learning curve in the beginning, the game is interresting & fun to play.

-Innovation: (4.5)
one clear step towards a terraria strategy game one day.

-Theme: (5)
Digging deeper into the ground in order to get richer

-Grafics: (3.5)
The grafics are simple, but effective & there are animations.

-Mood: (3)
Dwarven mining company goes brrrrt. The game is more strategic than emotional, except dwarves getting lost ... in the sky?

-Overall: ( 4 + 4.5 + 5 + 3.5 + + 3 -> 4 )

The Points I would like to rate here:

-Quality/Polish: (3)
there are some bugs/glitches, especially the dwarves that get lost the one way or another are painfull.
... and there was a gamebraking bug. Returning instead of restarting a match via the mainmenu is a bit odd. Nice to have some tooltips. It is good to have a mainmenu.

-Genre: (4)
This game could be a great example of platfomer-strategygames (there should be a better name for this genre, honestly).
What was LEMMINGS genre called?

-Szenario: (3.5)
The goal seems to be mining more in order to upgrade - I wonder if there is something to discover in the depths.

-Setting: (4)
Dwarves are mining, ho, ho ho!

-Story(telling): (x)
It's about mining, not love triangles.

Gameplay:

-Controls: (3.5)
Parallel to WASD there could have been a arrow key control, or border scrolling.
Placing jobs works well, it's not necessary easy to learn how posts function, but it's not frustrating.

-Rules: (3.5)
The way upgrades are obtained, maintained & how they were made usefull, was good.
They Pathnode system is a bit odd and the dwarves should always check if they can go a path.

-Complexity: (4)
There are Dwarves as active workforce, a main building with upgrades, those upgrades need a kind of maintenance, multiple resources to mine,
environment to shape, & some interactive strucuters like the posts and the stacks.

-Difficulty: (3)
There are no adversaries, the game is a economy simulation for a dwarven mining company.
You could make a mistake into an idea, the game has not many obstacles and dwarves getting lost, quitting their jobs (some dwarves left the mine at surface) would add some spice to it.

-Content: (4)
The map is quite big (and world generation in the future would be neat), and there are some assets to play with.

Nice game with simple yet interesting concept. Might be a little difficult to learn at first, but it's okay.
Spot on the theme.
Would be cool if you update it further!