An Idle Brick Breaker Game, where you dig down, instead of breaking up.

First off, the game is very visually striking. The shadows are designed perfectly, everything looks very clean and polished, the upgrades are interesting and overall I really liked this game. Unfortunately the game crashes a lot. Whenever you beat a level it seems to have a 50% chance to go to the next level, or to just crash. Other than that, I think the pacing is kind of slow when you are just starting out and when you are near the end of a level. I think with a bit of work this could be a really, really solid story game. Again it is absolutely on point with the design and the look and feel. Fix the crashes, give the balls a boost or something when most of the dust is collected, and start the player with a few more balls and you really are on to something. I love this entry.

This was quite fun and i played it a long time, the graphics are great, the start is a bit slow but then it ramps up quickly and the artifacts are very nice. Though it did eventually crash at Depth 80 and im not even sure if there are any more artifacts after that.

@purebe Thank you for all your feedback! I agree with all of your gameplay facing notes, and I *think* I managed to clear out the crashes in an updated version.

@wunarg Thank you so much for playing! To be honest there are only 5 Depths designed, I'm amazed the game didn't break long before Depth 80.

I was a bit confused at first, but the game turned out to be oddly relaxing and addictive. I think it'd make a great mobile game if development were to continue.

@refrax295 Thanks! Yeah I flubbed the introduction a little, but I definitely think I'm going to keep chipping away at this. Going deeper and deeper, :smirk:

good mechanics, i like it

I was unable to install your game using the itch desktop app. It looks like you have a zip instead of a typical build folder. Itch has a tool called butler that you can use to automatically publish builds and they will work from the desktop app. Reply if you are able to publish a non-zip build and I will play.

Visually stunning, everything is beautiful and the game is interesting. Would love if the game doesn't crash as much. The game can also be slow at times, but that was fine for me.

Great job, really, the graphical design is awesome!

Graphics are beautiful. Icons, colors, everything is pleasant and consistent. At the core a usual brick breaker game but well polished visually. Played with joy.

@rhoff95 Thanks for the info! I'll investigate making an itch-desktop friendly build tonight.

I wrote an explanation here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/afraid-to-turn/easiest-way-to-upload-game-builds-automatically-almost-no-work. Building and uploading can be a pain, and I want to play more games, so I hope it works out.

The game looks really well polished! Nice!

@plazyqwerty Thanks you for playing! I appreciate the feedback.

Excellent visual style and especially music! It is so soothing and relaxing.

I was slightly confused when I first started playing but I got the hang of it eventually. It's a pretty interesting idea. Brick breaker with a twist.

Unfortunately, the game still crashes (or, more specifically, hangs and becomes unresponsive) when I destroy the last brick, with Embark_LD48_V3 on Windows (played locally, not HTML5).

I don't really have any suggestions. Maybe a little tutorial to explain the basics would be helpful?

This is one of my favorite games so far.
If you get around to fixing the crash, please ping me, I would like to play some more.

Thanks @mvasko2! I'll try and sort out the crashing issues this week. Really bummed that I didn't nail down the culprit. But you are absolutely right about the lack of tutorial. The game just sort of dumps you in without context or goals. I think it's probably the highest priority addition to the game.

Update: I tried playing once again, this time I made it without a crash to 100 meters (then it crashed again). I do have one suggestion after all.

I started buying every artifact that I could afford, starting with the one that drops more coins, and after a while, I'd say it started to become almost too easy. I mainly just watched my 10 gigantic excavators destroying everything in their path while being blocked by two very wide paddles.

Not that it wasn't satisfying to watch, but I think the artifacts should be balanced more carefully. Maybe make them more expensive? Or come up with bricks/other things that complicate things? I'm not sure.

Still, this is a great game, you've done a great job.

Thank you for the additional feedback @mvasko2! I agree the fact that there's no "downside" to the artifacts is a problem I think I have a solution for, but I didn't want to risk increasing the scope of the project for the jam. Basically I want to give each Ball and Paddle their own "inventory" that you can manage by equipping artifacts. I think that'll help generate some interesting decisions for the player to make. I also want to add more Spells that interact with different artifacts in interesting ways, but again, scope.

Very nice visuals and audio! Well done!

Gameplay wise it could be more fun + it being a bricks game I spend the first 5 minutes trying to move the paddle before realising i wasn't supposed to.

Thank you for the experience! :smile:

Fun game, was having a great time with it and then it crashed. Hope you're able to fix that! I like the add-on system

As others have mentioned, the graphics are VERY well done. I also quite like the music. It's relaxing. I think my main confusion is that I neglected to read the word IDLE in your description so I spent the first several moments trying to figure out how to control the platform at the top of the screen :laughing:

After playing for a bit, I have to say that being an idle game seems to have the implication that I have to wait around for a while before I can actually do much :/ I've not been patient enough to get past the first 10m level so I feel like I'm likely missing out on a lot of the game. Which is a shame because it looks like you've put a bunch of thought into crafting something that's pretty cool, but I can't get far enough along in the game to see it.

I like this a lot! It also crashed for me (HTML5 version), though I didn't catch at what depth it was.

Ah no! I got to a depth of 60 meters before it crashed. I would have played more otherwise :(
Thank you for this great, relaxing game! At first I thought there was a bug which made me unable to move the platform. But as i continued playing I learned that it was intentional :)
The first reaction was 'well that is a bit strange, how can I ever save all my excavators when my spell has such a long recharge time'. As I continued playing I realised I did not have to save all my excavators, as long as I kept my reserve full enough. It was a nice balancing between buying upgrades for efficient block-breaking, and upgrades for surviving. It almost had like a relaxing city-builder game vibe after a while. Thanks a lot for this! I might actually come back to this one later to try it again! (Although the crashes are a real shame. If you fix them, please let me know :D)
My feedback would mainly be about the start of the game. First of all, there is no tutorial at all, which makes it very confusing at the beginning. Secondly, there is not much to do in the first level. You just wait until your excavator has excavated all the blocks, whilst shooting him down with your spell once in a while. Perhaps it would help if you decreased the number of blocks to break in the first level?
I also noticed that my 'make platforms wider' artifact did not increase in price. So I could make them as wide as I wanted to :P
Thanks a lot for this! This was amazing :D

I wanted to get all the upgrades but it started crashing a lot at around depth 50. That was well past the time I really oughta have played the game though so I can't fault it much for that. Graphics and music are great. I was thinking in the beginning that some sound on collision would be good but then I saw how many balls I got and think not putting that in is probably for the best :P. Great game!

This is a good idling game! I really liked the general mood and vibes while playing - everything from the sound/music to the intro text haha.

Wow! Thanks for all the really awesome feedback everyone!

I'm going to take another stab at knocking out the crashes that are still happening, hopefully tonight. For the future of this project though, I'm going to give myself a few days before I dive back in. I'll be starting with improving the onboarding experience, and smoothing out the progression. Whatever changes I'll be making will be in a new branch of the project, to maintain the LD48 version (with all it's warts).

really interesting idea, I think it is a bit slow paced but that makes it very relaxing too, well done on a good entry.

Really unique gameplay, with polished UI and beautiful graphics too! Nice works!

The music is calming and I like the concept and simple art style. Maybe it's the fact that I'm not really experienced in idle games, but I'm really not sure what I should be doing in this game. Are coins and dust the same thing?

Loving the concept of a idle brick breaker! The artstyle is very nice, the UI interactions smooth, and the music + vibe soothing, I definitely enjoyed playing. However, I do have to admit that I was a little confused about what was going on once I started out. I get that we collect 'dust' by breaking blocks, but I have no idea what we use that for? You seem to need coins for upgrades, but I didn't see my amount of coins displayed anywhere. So at first I thought the dust was my 'coin' amount, but that also didn't seem to be the case, as I couldn't buy a 25 coin upgrade when I had 40 dust, so that all was a little confusing. However, I could totally see this being a really fun idler if all of that was a little clearer, definitely well done!

@steve-johnstone & @virtual-turtle-studio I was calling "Dust" "Coins" earlier in the jam, and I COMPLETELY forgot to update the strings in some of the UI elements. So yeah, Coins are Dust. Thanks for playing and thank you for your feedback!

Very zen idle game. Music is a great match to the play experience.

Minor nitpick, but the upgrades have a "Coins" cost, but you're actually spending and collecting "Dust". I was confused for a bit as to how I collect coins, until I just tapped an upgrade and saw that it was consuming dust.

It crashed for me when clearing the last brick of a level. I was trying to use an arcana at the time, so I'm not sure if that might be related.

Great work!

@jason-wilson Thanks for your feedback! Yeah there's a bug related to save-serialization that's causing a crash. I'll be making an update soon to try and fix it.

So relaxing... I appreciate it, I just had a little bug where the game crashed when I was finishing a floor but according to the comment I see above it will be fixed, so good
Thanks for the game!

I'm not gonna lie, when I first saw this I thought "oh no, another breakout clone..." - I gave it a shot anyway and I'm super glad I did! This was oddly calming and a clever use of the theme. I never knew I wanted a breakout idling game, but now I'm really hoping you'll take this idea further!

I always try to give a little critical feedback, so here's that. Unfortunately I hit a crash eventually, though I managed to get to layer 70 and unlocking a few 250 coin artifacts first. I was a little sad because I wanted to keep playing, but at least I got a good taste of the game. I also got into a couple situations where a ball got stuck on the side/bottom of the screen, and I couldn't seem to get the arcana to move it.

That said I really liked this! The sound and graphics worked really well to help sell the calm mood. Thanks for a really fun entry!

Thanks so much for your feedback @zetius and @cppchriscpp!

Even though there is very little in terms of interaction, I was hooked for quite a while and played until there were no further upgrades to buy. Very relaxing music and I like the clean visuals.

That was amazing!! I ended up playing until I maxed out the upgrades, and would have played more. Visuals are super nice, but I actually think music is what really makes this so beautiful. Grats!

It's an excellent redesign of a brick breaker, the upgrades are very interesting even if at some point you feel a bit too much the idle side where you just have to wait to get the dust.

I liked it a lot and it's certainly a game I'll play again in the future ♥

@kristof, @nyxkn and @bnmkt thank you for your feedback! I'm trying to make time to make more of the game to play.

Great reinvention of the formula, super relaxing and zen, it even has some autoclicker thing going on, which makes it addictive hehe. Very well put together, music and gfx are amazing, they fit perfectly with the entire mood of the game. Really well done!! Congrats!!

Btw It's been added to my itch collection to play when I feel stressed out haha.

Thanks @webox! Hoping to eventually flesh it out a little more so it doesn't get too stale.

It took me a bit of time to understand what I had to do, but once I figured it out it was pretty chill. I played it until I unlocked everything. Good job on this one!

The graphics are neat! The music is good at conveying a "chill" mood. Nice take at incremental games!

Incredible atmosphere comming from your game, and the light and the ost really strengthen this feeling. The game is very chill and would make a wonderfull mobile game I think, but I think it suffers from the lack of an in game tutorial when we put our hands on it for the first time. Overall you really did an excellent job, great compo entry!

@mrpouletbzh I 100% agree, I did a very poor job of exposing the point of the game and how to engage with it. It's a lesson for next Compo, I need to budget some time towards onboarding the experience.

And thank you @apos and @sentmoraap!

Very Cool Idle game, I think if you add some procedural levels and tidy it up some more this could be a working mobile release !

Interesting concept. Super casual. The game plays itself after all the upgrades. It's almost relaxing to watch and you can occasionally interact with it. I could see this running on a digital billboard of sorts in a mall. People could walk up and touch the screen to knock some of the balls around occasionally.

Looks great, nice music. It's very passive in the beginning before you get any resources to buy any upgrades. Very zen experience. Good job!