Space Trench Miner by notime4games
Made for Ludum Dare 48 "Deeper and deeper"
Controls: Mouse used for menus :) Movement: Arrow keys or wasd Jump: Space or mouse2 Dig: F or mouse1 Call hook: B or click Abort button
| Link | https://www.dropbox.com/s/f598ed0djntd8b8/LD48-stm-source.zip?dl=0 |
| Link | https://notime4games.itch.io/space-trench-miner |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/space-trench-diver |
Ratings
| Overall | 698th | 3.091⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 750th | 2.773⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 690th | 2.773⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 99th | 4.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 186th | 3.886⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 560th | 3.068⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
Really like the graphics in general the most.
The cost of the first upgrades and the time required to mine seems well balanced for me, even at the start.
I would have loved more content : more type of upgrades, more block types you could encounter when you go deeper, a final objective, ... But for a compo, it is already great.
Graphics are nice and reminded me of Starbound.
There is a bug with the grappling hook. You can sometimes encounter it while you are digging. And it is especially annoying because if you touch it, it cancels your run.
I got also a weird bug when upgrading, but I can not completely explain it, so it may not be reproduced :
I had 3117 credits. I bought my last upgrade. But the money showed was still 3117. Then I came back to the main game menu, and the credits showed 617.
When the robot has only one block under and, and when it is not correctly placed, it does not dig the block. It's a little annoying when you have bought many upgrades and you just want to drill faster and faster.
The launching animation is a little confusing. I thought I could click somewhere to choose my destination, or I had to click at the right time to correctly land on the planet. But it is just a non-interactive animation.
It seems to take too long to get the first upgrade. 100 is a lot when that ends up being 5-10 trips of spending all your time mining at nodes that take 5 hits each. If the first upgrade were 20-30 instead then this would really help with the early game pacing a lot!
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but the mining for me was very slow. I think it could have benefited from being much faster. Maybe even by a factor of ten.
First is, although the mining gets a bit faster, it seems that the rate of progress stays slow essentially the entire game. I eventually decided to stop playing after getting all level 3 upgrades and one level 4 because I was spending so much time on the game and not getting anywhere. The first upgrade seems especially slow simply because it requires 500 block hits at minimum to get. After that upgrading does become easier, but eventually I ended up just being in the mines for a very long time, even though I could dig a lot faster and get to the more valuable ores.
This speed of the game, where it stays rather slow-paced seemingly the entire game, is a hard sell, to be honest, but it is unexpected too. One surprising aspect is that it is almost pretty engaging, in some sense: it always feels like fast progress is *just out of reach*. This feeling is I suppose somewhat universal to clicker-type games, but I definitely felt it here. I kept thinking I was going to start speeding up the game quite a bit but I never could. I think if the game was just a tiny bit faster, this feeling could carry me through the whole game quite easily.
The second interesting thing is the fuel upgrade. So, of course, because I am so impatient, I immediately go for the speed and power upgrades. But to actually make progress faster the fuel upgrade is absolutely vital due to the ability to mine a greater quantity of valuable ores per run. This is a really neat interaction between the different mechanics.
Overall, I think that particular thing is what I like most about this game. It is kind of like an idle game, or whatever, but the mechanics it uses to do that are really quite neat. It has a lot of the same progression curves I might expect from an idle game, but instead I have to do mining instead of clicking, or whatever, and the choices I make in my upgrades manifest as physical differences of how I can navigate the mine. I think that's pretty cool.