Mineshaft by ditam
A 2-player card game about mining operations - go deeper and deeper into the mineshaft! 
How to play
The goal of the game is to have the most money when you reach the end of the mineshaft. The mineshaft is shared between the two players, so be careful what you destroy or unblock!
Every turn you can either buy a new card for your hand, or dig using your existing cards. You start with 3 pickaxes and the capacity to retrieve 1 treasure card from the shaft every turn. At the end of a turn the revealed cards go back on top of the shaft deck.
You can buy the following items (item cost): - Pickaxe (0): reveal a new card from the shaft deck. Can not go through rock. - TNT (0): destroy the last revealed card in the mineshaft, as well as the unturned card behind it. Single-use. - Lantern (1): look at the top 3 cards of the shaft deck. - Sieve (1): swap any 2 cards that are revealed in the mineshaft. - Sub-shaft (2): bypass a rock card without destroying it. - Sabotage (2): discard alongside a TNT to destroy a card of your choice in your opponent's hand. - Mine cart (3): (passive) you can extract 1 more treasure from the shaft per round.
There's an AI opponent so you can play on your own. :)
Bugfixes added on 2021-04-26:
- Sabotage now correctly consumes a TNT
- Sabotage and TNT now don't result in glitched out cards breaking the whole game (QOL!)
- Buying is no longer possible if cards were already played that turn
- Fixed/improved AI to not be stuck on rock cards
Bugfixes added on 2021-05-01:
- Added blockers so you can't click during the AI's turn (guys, please...)
- Fixed cards getting stuck in the mineshaft after a Sieve action
- Fixed card-selecting actions to block other actions until done
| Link | https://github.com/ditam/mineshaft |
| Link | https://tamas.xyz/mineshaft/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/mineshaft |
Ratings
| Overall | 274th | 3.667⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 259th | 3.632⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 117th | 3.895⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 192th | 3.965⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 468th | 3.421⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 515th | 2.256⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 615th | 2.979⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 123🗳️ | 107🗨️ |
Great Job
Everythings are too minimalistic
But it's the Jam
Good
Like it
I've pushed out some bugfixes today, including a major one where Sabotage and TNT could result in perpetually glitched out cards from that round on :-//. Apologies to anyone affected. Hopefully it's properly playable now.
@samguy I'll definitely try working on it, I had to leave behind many items on my to-do list. I agree that the hand visibility needs work, I have multiple improvements in mind for this:
- there should be an option to view any card in full, either by sliding them out when hovered, or (maybe on mobile) an optional 2-stage select-and-play workflow
- cards of the same type should be stacked with a counter - there's only 7 different action cards in the game, so any hand should fit into 7 slots
- probably the whole layout should be shifted up, since the current player's cards are always brought to the bottom anyway (when I first did the layout, I was planning to have the opponent play from the top).
Polish is very good. Removing cards from opponent's hand looks very strong tho. The IA really killed my game haha.
Good job !
My first game was a really tight victory against the AI, with only one dollar difference. My second game I understood what I was doing, and I won 12 to 5. (Although I am sure that luck played a large role there as well :P)
The AI plays its moves pretty slowly. For the first game this is great, because I had no idea what was going on. For the second game it might be nice to be able to speed that up a bit.
Besides adding a few sound effects and visual effects (like rock particles when you dig, or explosions when you use TNT), I dont know what other feedback to give. It plays great! Thanks a lot for making this ^_^
I did notice one bug, though - One time I accidentally pressed the end turn button on my turn, then again on the enemy turn. It ended the enemy turn, then had the AI do my turn for me, then discarded all non-pickaxe cards from my hand. Then, the AI played through its own turn. Then, I was able to play again. This put me at a significant disadvantage, but I still was able to pull through in the end.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed the game. It had some neat strategy involved. You should try to develop this more! I really think it could become a releasable game if you put a bit more time into it.
As for the AI bugs, @spydercrawler & @wuppos, these issues are happening because there's no proper turn API for the AI to use, so instead it just simulates timeouts and clicks on the cards like the player would... as such, you can click into the AI turn, which causes all kinds of glitches! I'll see if I can add a simple bugfix for this, in the meantime, just think of it as a rouge AI that does not take kindly to interference.
Thank you for the comments.
Great work!
I think I broke the UI at some point, the sieve seems to workd strangely, then a rock stay on the screen, then the lantern panel would stay...
You should drop a line in the description about what'S the end game / or is it a spoiler ? Edit: I found the end game. I lost cause I spend to much on equipement...
Some ideas to go further :
* Having 3 possible decks to explore! 2 of them has Diamonds at the end,1 have magma! Anyway it would be the end game if the 2 diamonds are reveal or the magma ( that would cause death ). Greedy greedy
Cards look really clean and nice, the only thing I'd suggest functionality wise is a way to zoom in on the cards. Had to Zoom in quite a bit to see what was written on the cards on the left, and had no way to see what was on the cards in my hand (unless I was missing the way to do that).
Great stuff!
@dhim and @xpycm thanks for the bug reports. I'll fix them before the weekend. The Sieve mechanic was added in a rush already into the submission hour, so I'm not entirely surprised it's broken. The AI I discussed above.
@boltkey I might just! I'll probably wait a bit to gather feedback for balancing issues (so not during the rating period), but I can absolutely see myself making a print & play version, in which case I'll be linking it in the description.
@phlip45 I'm not familiar with Thebes but I'll check it out! As for zooming in or viewing hand cards in full, there is no way to do that currently, but it's on my to-do list.
I'm not sure if this is a bug but I can buy stuff for the AI while just after I press the 'End turn' button.
Also, I can spam the End turn button which I think glitches out the cards.
Anyway, Awesome work, lots of fun!
I have pushed out a version that fixes the Sieve action (which had all sorts of issues), and by popular demand, disallows play during AI turns. Thanks for the bug reports @blockerz @spydercrawler @geo3d @xpycm @lazzor!
I will come back to this one I think!
The gameplay is really nice and I'm sure we can come up with very interesting strategies and it can become very complex. The only thing I would suggest is to allow player to zoom on the card in the shop before buying them, it was a bit small to read for us and we had to rely on your description in this page to know what the card did.
Congratulation! This is really a cool game! :v:
As for the card zoom issue (flagged by @togis and @nsadie and maybe others too), I agree that this needs to be added, and it's probably the top item on my list, but as a new feature it'll have to wait for a post-jam version after the rating period. The thing is, I would not like to slow down the game by switching to a two-click workflow for playing cards, so it would need to be a togglable setting, or maybe I'll just add a magnifying glass / info button with which you can select any card to view in full, but otherwise not change the game flow (this would also be the easiest to implement, so I'm biased :-p).
Right click to zoom on the card, left to buy / use.
The right click could then work on any card, not only the ones on the store, but the one in your hand as well.
It's very possible you didn't get to see all cards during a game - the shop always has Pickaxe and TNT cards, but the bottom 2 slots are re-filled with a random card when one is bought. (I imagine in a physical version these would be fixed size decks reshuffled before every game).
As for buying any card at any time, you could just keep buying TNT until you've exploded the whole shaft deck, and end the game on round 1 :) Making TNT cost something also wouldn't quite work, because having a 0-cost TNT ensures that you never get stuck in the shaft, which allows for fully randomized shafts - even though in the jam version the shaft deck is always the same.
In general, I was very aware of the opportunity cost of shopping (hence the 0-cost cards), but I am thinking of lowering the money costs of the special cards further, to encourage people to use those more. Thanks for your detailed feedback!
The animations are mostly CSS indeed, only laid out cards (the revealed shaft and the hands) are positioned from JS, but even that could probably be solved with a CSS flexbox or two.
here some of my suggestions if you plan on working on it more:
-make cards in shop larger (just making each one larger when you hover over them could be effective)
-Show the text of the cards in your hand (I think this might have been a choice for the 2 player mode). I think you could also just move the card upwards when you hover over it if you dont want to clutter the screen
-Don't swap the cards around when playing against AI (I know for sure this was done for the 2 player mode xD)
-I like the simple art style and colors, but the Player 1 and Mr AI text color is way too saturated/vibrant
(I read some of the comments about the zooming ideas, but I think just making them larger when you hover is one of the more practical solutions)
This would be an awesome game make a print and play PDF of to put on itch so people can play against each other IRL! If you change the Sabotage card wording a little bit, I think it could easily support more than 2 players and be a party game xD
I'm a bit wary of adding hover-only effects, because I want to support mobile and touch UIs properly too. What I like about those ideas in other comments of opening a full-size, zoomed view of the cards is that it does not need to interfere with the regular gameplay UX, it can just be a button used by people learning the game. After a couple of games, seeing only the card titles should be sufficient, there's only 7 different cards to learn after all.
What do you have in mind for Sabotage in a 3 or 4 player mode? Destroying 1 card of each opponent feels a bit unintuitive/unnatural (ie. how do you use 1 unit of TNT to destroy multiple items in different mining camps?), destroying 1 card for each TNT discarded might be too weak (with a bit of over-simplification, say you can spend 3 turns' worth of TNT to set back 3 opponents by 1 turn each, is that good enough?). But yeah, I can see the former working OK.
I do plan on creating a print-and-play version eventually. When I do, I'll add it to both here and to the hosted version of the game, should you want to bookmark either :)