You Know The Drill by Maksime


After 2 years without participating, we're back for our 4th Ludum Dare ! :smiley:
Synopsis
You travel from planet to planet in search of a "planet heart" a mineral that is supposed to make you rich enough for multiple lifetimes.
Upgrade your equipment to dig deeper and find the planet heart.

Controls
- A/D: Move left/right
- E: Interact
- Space: Jump/Use jetpack
- Left Mouse Button: Dig block
Credits
Programming
- Maksime
- Metalfox
- Youhou
Music & Sound
- Dioxymore
- Maksime
| Link | https://spicyfrog.itch.io/you-know-the-drill |
| Link | https://spicyfrog.itch.io/you-know-the-drill |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/you-know-the-drill |
Ratings
| Overall | 510th | 3.766⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 339th | 3.766⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1269th | 2.956⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 477th | 3.956⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 462th | 3.671⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 891th | 2.699⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 900th | 3.5⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 112🗳️ | 186🗨️ |
also not sure if it was intended, but running out of oxygen was... terrifying to say the least.
Hope you managed to get a planet heart ! :smile:
@kudneus Thank you ! We didn't want the planet heart to be too deep so you guys can test the whole game without spending hours on it :)

Really liked the intro. Line by line fed story (especially when accompanied with some visuals) is always a superior to walls of text even though they make the player read just the same. Could have made the message box a tiny bit better still though. The color choices seemed like programmer choices (eww yucky pure red and green) in comparison to the artist made pleasant graphics. :sweat_smile: Also I would have opted for a line break before the gray help text here...

Also might be a good idea to scale the UI. Unless you're aware, there is a "canvas scaler" component by default attached to canvas element on Unity where you can toggle UI to scale with either screen height or width (or both). That way the UI will remain the same proportion instead of getting ridiculously small on bigger resolutions.

Another weird thing was the magenta NPC. Yet again a pure bright color! Why the hell was it purple. I mean it even had a unique idling animation yet to differentiate it from the player you just tinted it. Would have been better even if it looked identical to player in my opinion. Oh right, I checked the credits and looks like it was some ready made art kit.
The base game loop was fine and had the legs to carry my interest till the end even though it did get pretty repetitive fast. The upgrades were kinda boring and didn't feel like they impacted the game that much by offering player any choices. It could have just as easily been triple priced "level" upgrade. And I'm pretty sure your power and speed were flipped. My first purchases were energy and then speed but after then purchasing the power upgrade as my third one, I noticed a pretty significant speed boost.
Some more interesting upgrade additions could be a drill range extension or something that would make sideways digging less tedious. Having to dig two blocks to proceed made it not really worth it and it was best to just dig straight down and grab whatever was near enough.
Would have been better if the values of different ores were shown somewhere. Especially in the case of diamond/emerald since they both appeared at the same height and wanted to know which one I should prioritize. Kinda had to figure out the values based on mining speeds.
The prompt for each time you used the teleporter was pointless and annoying. Just a complete waste of time. Even if the player by some chance didn't want to do with there would be zero repercussions to just immediately teleport back.
Something weird going on in the corner here btw...

The teleporter "glass" isn't high enough. Also would have really preferred if the top portion didn't have collisions at all. It just made it annoying to get inside there at times. Especially with the bit too speedy controls. A lower acceleration for the movements would have really made it more pleasant.

Music was nice and the sounds that were there were ok too. But the missing effects for drilling at least (not sure if there were others missing too) made it less cohesive experience. Digging was the only thing that had a nice particle effect accompanied with some screen shake too so that being the only silent thing was weird.
Anyways, I think that's all I've got, good job! :thumbsup:
@antti-haavikko That was an awesome comment, I am speechless. Thank you a lot for taking the time to write such a detailed review. As wannabe-game-devs, this kind of feedback is really important for us, and I agree with pretty much everything you said (and yeah, I am the developer responsible for the pure red/green in the text... Sorry ^^'). We will take a look at the canvas scaler because it bothered us for pretty much all our games (we used the "UI Toolkit" this time thinking that is was the solution, but it wasn't) ! Thank you again for all your tips, it will help us a lot to make even better games :) !
Nothing much to say. This is good.
Maybe a sound effect for the drilling ?
And we can't go to caves of 1 square high, it's just asking for moar digging ;)
The game itself is really fun though. You guys managed to create an extremely addictive gameplay loop that had me hooked from the start. I don't think I've ever played a single LD jam game for so long
There's this nice gameplay loop of mining selling buying repeat that is quite addictive (although it can get a little bit repetitive)
The art is nice, even though the background sky could use some more texture
The music is good
There's also this nice sense of progression that goes on when you buy more upgrades, it feels really nice!
@skleembof Thank you for coming back and trying again! We will investigate that strange glitch by downloading the game on different PCs... We are glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for your review :) !
I'm not clear on the difference between "drill speed" and "drill level". The latter seemed to make my drill faster...
The music is nice, the art is cute, and I'm really impressed that you found time to implement an opening cutscene.
Very nice game loop. +1 for dynamic music with depth.
@diringer-leo Thank you for your feedback ! Adujsting the game scaling was a bit tough since each planet is randomized, and good/bad RNG impacts a lot the speed of the early game. We will take that in consideration for our next games, thank you =)
@hansj A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an extract from our Discord brainstorming, 34 minutes after the theme reveal:

Motherload was totally our starting point, and it was a true pleasure to be able to make a little tribute to that masterpiece, more than a decade later =). We still wanted to do something a bit different, so we opted for that "rogue-like" aspect where you start from the top each time ^^.
@thomas-olsson Yeah, unfortunally, we don't have any graphic designer in the team, so we can't really go deeper and deeper (;D) in the artstyle ^^. We wanted to add some distinct features to stand out from the classical "digger games", but 72 hours flies so fast ! We are glad you still enjoyed our little game =)
Fun & short, i like it !
My only problem with it, that I could finish it with a third of the improvements. You should put the heart a little deeper
The progression curve seemed pretty solid to me, the graphics were cute, and the music was solid! But the lack of almost any other sounds was quite jarring.
The random generation was cool but I also felt a cool aspect could have been keeping the same terrain every time the player returned, so that they could continue going down tunnels they've burrowed with their new upgrades, further into the theme of deeper and deeper.
Nonetheless, well done!
- Progression curve designed well, and graphics are very cool
- Great sound design and music at all
Things may be improved:
- It's a bit easy, but if you will balance it, it will be awesome
Great job!
Overall a great job, nice visuals and good sound in the background.
I liked how you used the story to introduce all the main mechanics (collecting the minerals, the randomized layouts).
Maybe the pacing could be a bit faster, but that's just my personal preference.
Just a solid, enjoyable entry. Good job!
Art, music and gameplay on point! Got me hooked until the end!
Congrats
@egercreator Thank you, glad you liked the game !
@chiyeon Congrats on getting the planet heart ! I KNOW about the sounds, I'm the one usually in charge of sound design and after recording a drill to make the sound and modifying it so much I thought "hey, this is a nice button click sound, let's use this !" and totally forgot to make the drilling sound for real...
@adil Thanks for the feedback ! We kept the game relatively easy so that you could play through it pretty fast to get to the end.
@retro-banana-man-nl Thank you for your feedback and suggestions ! The display of ore price was definitely on our todo list but we didn't manage to have enough time to do it unfortunately.
@tengusheath Thanks for the kind words ! As stated above, I know too much about the lack of drlling sound, it haunts me since then, haha.
@marcionix Glad you liked it !
@maybeagoose Thank you for that, we appreciate it !
@edouardlapoire Thank you very much for your kind words ! Hope you could get your hands on a planet heart after buying all the upgrades ! Thenk you for your suggestions !
@asdehielo Congrats for your heart, you're rich my friend ! See above for the missing of sound effect for the drilling, haha. Thank you for your review !
@divagated Well done for your planet heart, hope you enjoyed getting it !
@markositta Thanks !
@quoc thank you for your review !
@googlefrog it's a bit slow at first yes, definitely something to tweak if we had enough time. The drill level increase the damage your drill does per tick and the drill speed allows your damage to tick faster, if you wanted to know :)
@nice-gear-games The movement is definitely a bit too fast for sure, we tweaked it but the change never made it to the final build, haha ! Jumping does not consume energy, only using the jetpack does. For the lack of sound effect, see several answers above, haha, thank you for your feedback !
@amigopadilha Thank you very much, glad you enjoyed our little game !
It'd need a bit more work to be balanced though. Through a large part of the game there's nothing preventing you from just cutting straight down, mining a lot on the way, and getting back up when you're almost out of energy. Players are lazy so if they have a boring but easy way to win, a lot of them will use it even though they're not having fun.
The tutorial at the beginning was nice.
Several times I tried to exit the shop menu with esc and the pause menu poped up, it felt quite weird.
Cool entry overall :thumbsup:
Очень увлекательная игра, я рад, что продал сердце и стал богат! ^_^
Oh, also - I really liked how the music changed and became almost muffled as you got deeper into the planet. Really nice touch.
@dom-de-re Glad you enjoyed our game !
@goldenevolution Thanks for the review !
@finntastico Thank you for the kind words, interesting idea for the teleporter to follow you, we'll keep this in mind ! :)
@xpoho Спасибо, что играете в нашу игру, рада, что она вам понравилась!
@doctortm Thank you ! The lack of up/down mining is totally explained in the lore :angel:
@garys Thank you very much for your nice review ! Glad you liked the adaptive music !
Since according to the story you visit a new planet each time, it would have been nice to have a better sky background that maybe changes its color scheme each time you warp down, for variety.
I feel like the intro graphics don't really go well with the graphics of the rest of the game. Both are nice (I love the character sprites and the planets in the intro are just so juicy!) but the styles don't mix together all that well.
Music is nice and adds to the chill atmosphere. And it changing with the circumstances is great - such attention to detail in a jam game!
I'm still split on the fact that the character does not fit into one grid square. I speculate that this is done for balancing reasons, but it doesn't feel all that good in gameplay. You get used to it, but something just feels off.
Also, I'm rich now!
