A challenging crafting game that made me paranoid about my fuel gauge lol. Loved the graphics and the overall mood, I hope you will expand on this game. Excellent work.

Music is nice and calming, I like the graphical style.
I was surprised when I pushed up and the little tank guy flew, there wasn't really any visual cue that he could float.
I've played more than 10 times but run out of fuel every time, even after I figured out what I'm suppose to do (I think), I don't have quite enough fuel to get the resources and return, and sometimes the random generation seems to make it impossible to get resources at all.
I suggest some easy tutorial tasks and more clear in-game instructions.

It's minecraft! Overall a good game. I like the fuel management mechanics. At one time, I barely made it to the refiner with nearly 0 fuel left. Then I decided to get both fuel tank upgrades ASAP :)

@sageware Thank you so much!

@shaolin-dave Definitely agreed! Tutorial info was one of the last few things that got cut at the last minute to try to submit... Perhaps I should include some more explicit controls in the description! As far as running out of fuel, you can make more by refining dirt, which definitely isn't super clear :)

Finished it!

Solid jam game - I'm not sure what the heat shield upgrade is for? Had some close moments on low fuel. I didn't see any bugs


@andykswong Yeah I think I tuned it pretty heavily towards anxiety! Hopefully the big red warning helped you make it there in time!

@ayced Ah yay! I had been wondering if it was a bit long for a jam game, I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to reach the end! If you don't have the heat shield before getting ~100 blocks deep you overheat :)

@alpharock6 Oh I see, yeah I built it but never understood what it was for

It reminded me of dig dug but with crafting... that's a nice idea actually.
I was just not that clear on how to refuel but I enjoyed a lot!
Good luck!

This was a pretty fun game, although having to always come back to the same refiners to get fuel back and to refine the materials did get rather repetitive, it would be neat if there was another one in the too hot zone to have mid-point

Really good game ! Good job !

This game shows combining Motherload with a crafting/refining system has a lot of potential! Would be cool to build new furnaces or even limited distance auto-miners or something. It's a bit weird how the fuel tank absorbs all the fuel even if it's full but it doesn't really matter as dirt is plentiful, just can't keep two smelters working on ore.

This was a relaxing game, probably because of the choice of music. The sound effects were nice, too. I love the idea of using the main material you dig for as the material you use for refueling yourself. I wish I could just carry fuel in my inventory instead of immediately using it every time I collected it. :joy: Also, it's kind of funny how the ice gets pretty close to the hot area; I thought it would have melted haha. It was surprising that the robot could float, but I think it was overall a good way to ensure you wouldn't get stuck. The game reminded me of a browser/mobile game called Dig to China, but it feels more consequential because you can lose all your progress instantly from running out of fuel. (although I think the warning is good, sometimes venturing too far from the path means there may not be enough time to get back!)

Nice game ! The feeling of going deeper and deeper is definitely here. Not the fact that you have to dig down deeper, but the fact that while digging, you're always asking yourself : will I have enough fuel to get back ? Ironically, this feeling is made more present by the fact that you have to do round trips to the surface to refuel !

This reminded me of Factorio ; It took some time but I made it to the end!

Very nice entry! Enjoyed having a very close situations on fuel :smile:

That was fun

The gameplay is simple but fun to play, and the exploration side is nice and sticks well to the theme I think, nice game.

The gameplay is simple but fun to play, and the exploration side is nice and sticks well to the theme I think, nice game.

The

The gameplay is simple but fun to play, and the exploration side is nice and sticks well to the theme I think, nice game.

Graphics could be more originals, gameplay is cool even if i've seen it before. Nice game. I got killed several times because I was not paying enough attention to the fuel gauge, my bad.

Nice solid game. I enjoyed playing it.
I like that you can let stuff refine and while you go get more ore.
I found it easiest to just make a single super long shaft straight down so the route back up would always be simple.
I'm guessing the level is infinitely deep by the way it freezes every 16 tiles if you go too deep, I presume it is generating the next chunk. I decided to stop digging when it was taking a good 45 seconds to fall to the bottom of my mineshaft. I'm glad there was no fall damage.

Nice and simple game, well crafted. I was searching for a "bottom" but I just arrived to the end of the "red zone" XD I had fun exploring and gathering all the materials needed to upgrade my escavator.

BTW I played the web version and I hadn't problems at all :-)

Oh the nostalgia :-) Kind of like a hybrid of Motherload and Minecraft, a very ambitious idea for a game jam. I think you implemented it well; the controls were good and I saw no issues with the procedurally generated map. All it needs is a bit more content, but that's definitely beyond expectations given the time constraint of the jam.

A very good entry, which had a good progression system and fit the theme perfectly. Reminded me of Steamworld Dig which has a very similar core gameplay loop of mining to get resources to get upgrades to go deeper, which considering this is a jam game is very impressive! Simple graphics and audio but good enough to convey what's going on. Only thing I would improve would be a more forgiving failure state. Perhaps you lose your current inventory and respawn at the top? Good job!

Thanks so much for all of the comments! I was crazy busy at work this week, finally getting around to these comments and playing all of your games :)

@binaryprinciple Dig-Dug is an interesting comparison! I wonder what kind of enemies/combat could be added in to this :) Refueling was definitely a common cause of confusion, I added a post-submission patch with a a small tooltip the first time you refine just to make controls a bit more clear!

@bluedingo Ohh totally agreed! One of my stretch goals that got cut was to have the ability to craft the furnaces so you could set up mini-bases the further down you got!

@raynorr Thank you for playing!

@bqq Yess, building furnaces is definitely my #1 next thing I would want to add. Auto-miners is in interesting idea, could you elaborate more on that? That's a really good point on fuel too- I couldn't figure out a good way to store fuel since I didn't want the player to be able to carry it around as reserves in their inventory, any ideas there?

@random-storykeeper Haha yeah the music is a bit contrasting to the "disaster!" messaging, but I thought it fit the core gameplay loop/atmosphere pretty well. And yeah, I added the visual "hot layer" pretty late on and oops it definitely starts before the ice does :'D I'll have to check out Dig to China! Do you think the warning coming on sooner would be helpful there?

@ace17 Deeper and Deeper^2 :O Thank you and congrats on beating it!!

@pineapplegladiator Awesome, I'm glad the stress factor of the gameplay loop worked well!

@brett-nz Thanks! :)

@benjamin-leroy Thank you! I'm glad the exploration felt meaningful for you!

@cam-mrchl Hehe my Aesprite skills are definitely well beneath my coding skills :) Thanks for playing!

@someone Haha yes! You 100% nailed the implementation (and the chunk size as 16!). Unfortunately it wasn't totally "chunked" in terms of separate tilemaps because that made the dynamic dirt tile shapes much harder to adapt, so I took the small freeze tradeoff by updating the single tilemap in place 16x16 tiles at a time to keep the dirt looking consistent. 45 second falls sounds really deep, I bet the freezes were getting much longer down there :P

@viperux Ohp! You're right! I looked back at the editor and have a big gap in the red heat overlay! Whoops :D You must have dug really far down to find that! You're one of the first to find the "true" ending apparently :P Thanks for stress testing the Web build!

@boxedmeatrevolution Yes!! I was definitely making some nostalgia for myself, and I'm glad you enjoyed it too :) I feel like that was one of the key pairings in my head while working on this. The sell/purchase loop of Motherload was one of the only elements that I felt got a bit old so I wanted to add in a reason to hunt out particular materials :) I think I implemented it pretty well for extension of new content, so let me know if you have any suggestions, I'd love to expand on this!

@marc-jones I've heard Steamworld Dig mentioned a few times in the last week after making this, I really need to check it out! Oh, that's a really good idea- I think I was a bit too tied to the gameplay loop of Motherload with permadeath. If this game were any longer I definitely wouldn't want to punish death that hard and inventory drop seems like a solid solution

Ah, forgot to mention the end of the red zone. Seems someone else did. I dug over twice that distance. The freezes were a couple of seconds long at that point. There is also some graphical weirdness with the generated holes being a different colour to the excavated areas when you get ridiculously deep.

@alpharock6 Hmm it could be neat if the warnings came on sooner the farther you ventured away from the refineries.

@alpharock6 re: auto-miners, thought it might be fun to be able to build some drone/bot that mines say 20 tiles the side and then you could collect the materials, might not be worth the cost though as ore is not that common. Yea the fuel situation is tricky, could store it in some non-movable containers but then it would just accumulate endlessly. Maybe you could use the leftover fuel as some ingredient in a future construction thingy :D

Enjoyed this a lot, keep it up!

Here I am! very nice implementation. Solid exploration mechanism and crafting system. The only concern I'd like to remark si taht the game is a bit slow at the beginning getting ton times better as you craft powerups. Neatly done, surrounding relaxing music help you having a pleasant game experience. Thanks for this submission :smile:

Good work! Overall, I think the game has great potential.

Really great game. Played longer than I probably should have 😅

Very good game !! I passed so much time on it, I like gameplay and smooth progress

A relaxing game, I liked the graphics and the gameplay in general. The sound is good too. The mechanics of mining are extremely relaxing. The gameplay is very easy to learn. In general a good job, congratulations.