I'm not 100% sure if I was playing the game right, but I mined some rocks, travelled into the mine and got rich quick! The first couple attempts though I just kind of walked into walls a bunch because the camera was zoomed in a bunch (if this is a bug, I was playing the WebGl version). Other than that, it was a fun little game!

You did a lot here, thanks for sharing! I only made it to the 3rd level before I ran out of sanity, it would be nice to have a better way to replenish it. Standing next to the light hardly seems to have any effect. It's interesting that more enemies seem to appear as you lose more sanity and some of them chase you around, making it more difficult to stay sane. Insanity is a cool mechanic, if you continue work on the game I'm curious to see what you do with it. I think the doorways to the next level should be slightly wider or easier to access. Also in the browser it would be nice to have a way to replay without refreshing the page

@candlebird I had basically the exact same experience as you.

lol - overall I enjoyed the game. At first, I was thinking 'these monsters don't move, this is easy' and then one of the smokemen and a dog started moving towards me and totally freaked me out. The game is actually pretty scary.
I don't know if I was doing it wrong, but standing next to the lights on the walls increases your sanity bar a little too slowly - and needing to only go to the last door to exit the game seems too easy. I think there is some balancing to do.

The art style is great. The gameplay feels just a little slow and clunky, but it's got a nice atmosphere. Well done!

I always enjoy small horror games ^^
Really liked the mood of this and definitely impressed by the amount of animations and sprites that you produced in such a short time. I wish the exits had some distinct markings but that's pretty much the only thing I had problems with.

Well done :D

I like the feel of the game and the sound effects are great! I wish I could have kept going deeper but it looks like it is only about 3 deep? I only got ~300 or so my first play through when I was being safe but was around 800 on the 2nd but wanted to get killed to see what happened. I like the ghosts!

Who doesn't love a mining game?? Solid first steps here and good overall concept surrounding "Insanity in the caves". There are a few things I'd like to tightened up in the game loop:
- There's nothing preventing the player from running past all ore and simply going deeper. There should be some requirements (a key, a price, something) to allow progress.
- The mining itself felt ok, could benefit from some better hitboxes and user control fluidity.
- Player upgrades is a big must-have for this sort of game. Faster motion, faster recovery from mining swings, mine ore in fewer swings.
- I was unclear what my "end goal" was. Some sort of mining deposit cart and a counter of my current $ value would be nice as a reminder of how well I'm doing before the game end.
- Add a sanity meter on screen and give the player a means to reduce their sanity by mining -> buying sanity potions -> repeat.

Good Job. The game story is engaging. The effect of the Ghosts dissappearing is amazing.

Good job man, this is great! I shat myself when I first saw the hallucinations lmao, great job on the dissolve effect too.

My main piece of feedback is that the amount of sanity given back when standing next to a light is incredibly slow to go up, and it seems as if you're powerless to do anything about dying once you've gone deep enough. Perhaps instead of instantly losing, reaching 0 sanity could turn all the lights out and cause hallucinations to start chasing you down - which means you'd still have a slight chance of escaping with the right amount of skill and luck.

Regardless, I loved the art and music, and the sound design was solid. The mood was spot on. Good Game!

I liked the take on the theme, but I wish there was a bit more to it. The end screen really needs to show your high-score and let you retry instead of quitting. Otherwise, the graphics and audio were quite pleasant. The fade out animation on the hallucinations looked pretty cool.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, it's been vastly better than I ever expected to get on my first casual attempt at a jam. I wish I had pushed a little harder on it so more of the original design made it in, but this has been highly encouraging for the next jam!

@samguy I definitely agree. The original plan was to have a small number of items you could find and use, such as kindling to start a fire that would create more light, or a collectable item tucked away in a corner that would permanently offset some of the sanity drain. Unfortunately most of this game came together in the final moments (there were 0 levels less than an hour before submission!) so a lot of the concept was cut out. I was trying not to burn out on my first game jam, but I do regret not pushing a bit harder to get more of that in.

@the-neon-shark Fantastic feedback, thank you! The original plan was that the sanity drain of later caves would be prohibitive without finding things throughout the earlier caves (unimplemented items mentioned above), but unfortunately I just didn't have quite enough time to make that vision a reality. I do really like the idea of taking things back to a mining cart as a sort of intermediate step, I think that would be a great addition if I do more with it.

@squeg-inc That is an amazing idea! I originally had bigger aspirations for the lose screen, but I hadn't thought of including a last ditch way for players to save their run. That would be a fantastic bit of tension that is sorely needed in the current version. If I continue with this that is definitely going on the todo list!

@thezingthing It's definitely a bit shallow at the moment. The score does show on the "win" screen if you exit before going insane, as a sort of show of success. I do agree the lose screen is pretty disappointing in its current state though and should at the least also show the score. A retry button is definitely needed as well, I did actually add one but it had to be removed right at the end as it was causing too many problems for me to resolve in time.

Really nice game ! I liked the graphics and the controls (eventhough I am not the biggest fan of the high speed of the character) and overall, the game was pretty pleasant to play. However, based on what I have played, the sanity concept could have been expanded a bit more with more explicit indications (like some kind of meter or things like filters), although I really liked the different kinds of Ghosts I could encounter. Also, since there weren't any indications of the materials I mined or the amount I should mine to go the next part of the game, I just ended up running around to the next part of the cave without worrying too much about mining.
Anyways, some things could be improved, but the current game is already pretty great, so good job !

The first time I played it on itch.io I didn't see the hud with the score and sanity meter. I had to expand to full screen to understand what was happening and why I went insane. Overall it was pretty smooth, there were a few times I tried mining the ore and nothing happened, and I got stuck on the wall a few times. Otherwise its got a lot of potential if you continue with it. Thanks for the game!

Very well done! You've nailed the atmosphere, and there were a lot of small things that I was really impressed by. The dissolve effect on the wraiths was very cool, and I loved the magnetic effect that drew the ore chunks into the player when they broke off the rock- great QoL feature! The only thing that I would take a second look at is how the player has to stop to swing the pickaxe- I feel like it slows down the momentum a bit. But aside from that I loved the entry! Good work!! :v:

Fun little game, I wasn't expecting the monsters in the dark as I was losing my sanity, that was a fun surprise. The art is great and I loved what your lighting did for the mood. Congrats :pick:

Fully agree with @the-neon-shark, you've got a great foundation here and accomplished a lot during the compo - just some work tightening the core-gameplay loop would go a long way towards player engagement.

I hope you can have fun using this project as a post-jam testing ground for those bigger ideas you didn't get to! Nice work!

Nice graphics with cute and well animated main character. Like the idea of loosing your sanity the deeper you get in the mine. I got stuck sometimes behind the ore, but besides that a Well Done Game!

Such a solid game! Everything felt so complete and polished. Very well executed graphics, I liked the shadows floating around - they are seriously creepy. Overall really nice mood with the perfect soundtrack. Loved it! Only piece I would change is make the shadows dissolve pixel-by-pixel instead of a smooth way as they do now. But seriously good game!

I like the idea of losing sanity in the dark. The visuals are great, especially the lighting. I think adding some feedback when sanity gets low, or when shadows are near would be nice. But overall this is really great work.

I think I won? I mean, I was mining then suddenly a status page appeared showing how much I mined (a couple of hundreds) and shows me a button to "Quit". It was a little confusing.

Graphics are good, I feel the oppressive mood of the game. I don't like the controls a lot, but I really don't like 2D games that uses keyboard to move and mouse to aim, it's confusing for me. FPS on the other hand...

Anyway, the game is good.

nice game really fun to play, love the overall look of the game and maybe the fact that we had the same idea about the sanity for both our games ;-) however i found a little bug where the player is not rotating correctly toward the movement direction and face the other way around. Anyway good job!

Hey! This is a very common mechanic that you have to balance what's the longest way you can go to be achieve the most but still be able to return. I found a bug, that the character cannot go right, or at least the sprite does not turn that way. I also thought the ghosts(?) will catch me, so I first ran away, but as nothing happened, I just tried to smash them as a plan B, but still nothing happened. And then I died, because I focused too much on them :)

This game is really good. At first I didnt know what I was really suppose to do, so maybe there should have been some kind of tutorial/explanation on the mechanics and the meaning you're doing it.

@mrtnldm I definitely agree on the dissolve being better if it were pixel by pixel. In retrospect just animating that manually would have probably been the better choice, but I did the effect with shaders and wasn't sure I could pull off a good pixelated looking effect in time. I'd absolutely change that if I do more with the game though!

@piopio-juegos Yeah, you successfully end a run by going back to where you entered the cave from. Unfortunately I completely ran out of time to make these spots clear so it's incredibly easy to stumble in by accident, or forget where you came in and be unable to find it. Definitely a significant issue that I just wasn't able to resolve in time.

@nocymer It's a great idea for a mechanic! The character should turn to face the direction of the mouse (well, left/right wise at least), though I would not be at all surprised to find there's a bug with it somehow, especially since someone else also had that problem. I'll have to see if I can replicate it.

@mudlee The character direction should vary depending on the mouse position, since you use that to kind of aim where you're mining. There could absolutely be a bug though since you're the second to mention it, I'll check it out. I definitely wanted to make the interactions with the hallucinations a bit more involved and responsive, including attacking to fend off weaker ones, so I think you were absolutely right to try it. What I would've given for a few more hours on the compo!

@pxldev I agree. The first level was meant to be a bit more instructive as a tutorial, but by the time I got to making the levels I had so little time to work with that it ended up a bit lacking. Definitely something I would like to improve on.

Nice job, I reached the 3rd level but after that I could seem to do anything else. No exit to carry on down nor could I figure out how to return to the previous level if that is even possible at this stage. I liked that as the 'sanity' meter got lower different types of ghosts appeared. Think it could be benefical if the the meter recharged a bit faster when standing in the light as felt at times I was just standing around for a minute or 2 not doing anything.
Really nice job though for the time allowed!

Great job! I dig with joy. Good art style - cute and cozy. There are problems with digging to the left. I like how the character tries)

This was a really good game! I quit enjoyed the unique concept of managing your sanity rather than a health bar. The art and music and sound were all excellent! I do feel the controls were a little awkward to use, but other than that it was a great entry. Good Work!