HELIUM by milieu

[raw]
made by milieu for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

Drill for He3. Die. Find the Promised Land.

Every month, as they have been commanded, the digging clans send an adult on a Dive. This person will not come back home. They will drill down, and forward, and they will either die or find their Promised Land, the CORE.

Controls:

Up Arrow: Move forward/drill. Also moves through text boxes. Left Arrow: Use coolant Down Arrow: Wait for a turn Right Arrow: Use drill repair tools Space: Select things in the shop

Ratings

Given 8🗳️ 2🗨️

Feedback

iellswo
27. Apr 2021 · 23:23 UTC
Interesting concept, though the controls are really unintuitive. Would be better to have the controls listed within the game itself rather than just on the itch page, I died about 5 times before I finally backed out and saw the controls listed, and by then I had run out of resources so all future runs became impossible.

There is a lot you can do with this concept, and I am interested in the narrative beats presented.
Chris Dirkis
28. Apr 2021 · 05:10 UTC
Interesting story, a concept you can do a lot with, but the actual content was lacking. There were decisions to make, but I didn't know what was meaningful and what was not (like, should I cool by waiting at a warm place instead of using a coolant? should I repair my drill before it breaks?). Adding more decisions, and more visibility on the outcomes of the decisions, would help expand this a lot.
anchorlight
01. May 2021 · 10:15 UTC
I love the fact that you went for something a little different from the genres you normally see front and center, and for a jam I think the visuals really do hit on the right beats for a retro game. Since I mentioned visuals though, you should probably set the sprites for your drill to no filtering so there's no blurring on it.

Your narrative is cool, and the survival side is awesome... but I feel that your game needs a little bit more explanation for how your rig works in-game.

I think @iellswo has a good point about the controls, and the fact that the itch page runs on its own fullscreen tab means you can't see those controls in-game; if you're willing to do some messing around, you could edit the index.html file to include the controls below the game in plain text. Let me know if I can help out with that, I'd be happy to assist.

I'd like to see where you go with this, maybe a short point-and-click/adventure game of sorts with some crispy audio and more dialogue.
Lisichka
06. May 2021 · 06:02 UTC
this... interestingly, I really like the concept, the player is immediately immersed in the atmosphere of the game.
JRevel
06. May 2021 · 09:22 UTC
I got quite confused by the controls of this game, maybe just displaying one button to click for each action would have made it easier. I did not really understand when to use coolant, I never lost because of that.
The graphics are quite cool, it gives some atmosphere to the game.