Gem Raiders by Hare Software

Gem Raiders
The Arex Corperation has recently found green crystals that emit large amounts of energy, these are the so called "Power Gems". It will be your task to control a group of workers to extract these power gems from beneath the ground. In order to do so you will have to extend your base and ensure the safety of your workers.
Features
- Stylish pixel art
- Basic Base building
- Real Time Strategy
- A lot of shiny gems
How to play
Mining
In order to mine the walls, you need to assign an order. This can be down with the two butons in the left bottom corner. Soft rock walls require shovels to be mined and hard rock walls require pickaxes to be mined. Diggers have shovels and Miners have pickaxes and they will automatically start performing the orders they are fit for. Once a rock wall is mined, it will drop rocks. If a gem wall is mined, it will drop both rocks and gems. Soft Rock walls will not drop anything.
Buildings
You can place down a building order and your workers will contruct it once all the mining orders are completed and all the resources are picked off the ground. Do not starting mining new walls if you want construction to be completed.
Combat
Danger lurks in the walls, but it will only reveal itself once the wall is mined. You can protect against these dangers by placing guards near your workers.
Information is also provided when hovering over the button.
Best of luck and I hope you have fun!
| Link | https://hare-software.itch.io/gem-raiders |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/gem-raiders |
Ratings
| Overall | 559th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 457th | 3.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 970th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 860th | 3.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 705th | 3.842⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1135th | 2.4⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1089th | 3.361⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
My friend absolutely adored playing, and tried his best to get further into the game. Unfortunately he was never quite able to reach the major milestones of having a barracks and hospital, but he kept trying anyway. What really would have made this game shine was some sort of ambient music and SFX during mining / resource carrying to really make those longer stretches of watching the little people work feel good. The graphics were cute, and they also perfectly accomplished the task of visual clarity. It was never unclear what could or couldn't be done in the game, or where to gather resources from. The game wasn't very humorous, and it had some tension but again the mood would have really been set had there been a soundtrack in the background, even if you didn't make the audio yourself and still marked the game as not being rated for audio.
Going through the individual scores, fun was the highest rating followed by graphics. The rest weren't very high, but the overall score was solid because this very much felt like it was doing something right. It was more than a sum of its parts. Really awesome job!
Christmas came around :christmas_tree: I opened one of my presents and it was Dungeon... keeper? oh. Not quite what I wanted but I guess it's a game.
Fast forward and I sat down to actually play it. I loved it.
This game tickles a lot of the same spots as that game does. I love the fact that you added the height adjust feature for the walls! Quality of life improvements like that are so rare in LD. Would love a post-jam version <3
Pros:
- Someone above mentioned LEGO Rock Raiders. Yes, this is a spiritual successor to it, which I adore!
- Beggining of the game reminded me of Incubation as well (very old game)
- Graphic wise pretty solid (pixel-wise)
- Polished and well-executed mechanics - Big +++ For Shift + LMB commands (multiple tasks)
- Big plus for auto-behaviour of units
- Scary and deadly enemies
Cons:
- Begs for music and other sound ques
- Begs for more 'flashy' environment - maybe a bit darker with some glowing stones of power gems?
Overall though, pretty solid game for JAM. I liked it a lot. Great job!
I agree with most of what has been said here, i absolutely loved getting to play an RTS like this, it's my favorite genre and this is the best execution of it that I've seen in a jam. The game felt surprisingly well polished and looked very well, considering the short time. Even the details like the small selection circle fit perfectly into the aesthetic.
The mechanics weren't too complex for a jam game but they were also complex enough to were economy had to be carefully balanced with infrastructure and military, a core aspect of RTS.
The only thing i felt that i missed was music.
some ambient scary music would've absolutely worked wonders and could've placed this game among the absolute best jam games I've seen, but even as it was, I am very impressed!
:heavy_plus_sign::heavy_plus_sign::heavy_plus_sign: :video_game:
:heavy_plus_sign: :art:
:heavy_minus_sign: :musical_note:
I found it too hard though, I would get completely wiped out whenever creatures were uncovered. The soldiers really don't seem to be very good at their job.
The mouse wheel scrolling the webpage was irritating, but solved by going full screen. Also the zoom step is far too large.
Played again and I think I just got super unlucky the first few tries. Managed to buy more soldiers before uncovering the nests of three creatures. Unfortunately the game crashed before I could complete it.
I only wish there was some background music and more sound effects, but the game as a whole is pretty good and it's amazing you could make something like this for the game jam.
Great job!