Hints (don't look unless you tried without!)

the artwork is fabulous, enjoyed playing the game (:

First thing I thought about was dig dug, but this is more of a puzzle. Really fun, really good! Also, it uses LÖVE wich gives me a lot of nostalgia.

@akiored love2d is so great for gamejams. It's super fast to get everything going, and lua is great for quick experimental projects like this. IMO the main downside of using a dynamic scripting langauge like Lua is that it gets hairy as the project grows, but in a gamejam it just... doesn't :D Ok I'll stop gushing now :p

Okay I'm a sucker for turn-based-puzzle anything, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a very clever premise that kept me trying again and again. I've also got to say, you might not have designed the sound yourselves but it was all wisely chosen. My only complaint is: it's a little short for how swiftly the difficulty ramps up. I'd love to play more of it. Awesome stuff!

Thanks @threeli! When making a puzzle game, it's always hard for me to judge how much players should figure out for themselves. I did a bunch of last minute tweaks to try to get across the oxygen mechanic properly, after a few playtests made it clear I needed to explain it better. Where did you feel the difficulty spiked? In learning the mechanics at the start, or later on? Also *spoilers* but, if you didn't find something that was obviously a secret, there might be a few more levels for you to play :p

@wheybags I should clarify that I didn't feel like it was overly punishing or anything like that, but maybe a few more intermediate levels between the penultimate and final would've been fitting. Really I'm just being greed and want to pla.... MORE LEVELS & SECERET you say. (I suspect I might know where it's at... and I'm kicking myself for not investigating it the first time)

Back into it I go.

I really enjoyed this, but I'd be lying if I said I'd truly figured out how the puzzles worked until after I read the "hints" section. I managed to finish 6 levels or so without understanding that the bubbles were oxygen, or that it was blocking the entrance that caused you to lose oxygen. The 7th level then suddenly felt much harder, and I couldn't work out why.

This may just be me, but the hint that says "BLOCK [LADDER] = LOSE [BALL]" could be clearer. The entrance and exit ladder are visually very similar, which led me to think that as long as *one* of the ladders was unblocked I'd be okay -- using different colors or sprites that are more obviously different might help. "[LADDER] BLOCKED = LOSE [BALL]" might also be a more accurate hint, since it's not the act of blocking the entrance that loses balls, but subsequent turns.

Sorry if this sounds critical. The game is great, I've rated it very highly, and I'll be back to play more! :smile:

Nice pixel art. Perfect for people who are into retro gaming.
The oxygen vanished a bit too quickly for me to be able to get to the end.

Me like the Drilbert! Good to see a löve game, the music is great, graphics too, but I would have had more fun, if it wasnt thaat stressful. The difficulty feels a bit high, not being the developer :)

This is a cool mix of movement rules (move, blocking, taking earth, putting earth, blocking entry, oxygen move, move blocks, ...). I had to think twice or three times in some of the levels. That is good, as often puzzle games of this type tend to be too easy. I like the pixel graphics, very consistent and nice colors. And so many levels for a game jam!

@pennycook Thanks for the detailed feedback! Changing the wording is a great point. It would also be nice to have a different sprite for the level exit. I'd like to have just a hole in the ground, but with the dark background I have already I think that might be hard.

The little drill is so cute! I love the aesthetic of the game and the puzzles are really engaging. Using oxygen as a resourse and having dirt on inventory management is really creative when combined. The puzzles were reaaaally tough, I got stuck on the fifth level after I get some rest I'm gonna go back and try to beat it. Good job! <3 love the little dril bert

That's a cool puzzle game ! It took me some time to understand the rules properly, but once I got it it was really fun to play :)
The only thing I find a bit annoying is the fact that you have to constantly take dirt and put it behind you, it becomes tedious at times, but I guess that's enforced by the movement rules...
That's a great entry overall :)

Great puzzle game! Amazing level design. It's relatively easy to crack levels once you get the idea how it works. But it's quite challenging to understand how it works at first. The idea is brilliant and would totally fly as a full-scale mobile game. Some things I would suggest are making level difficulty scale up slower and some present visual guidance at first, ability to undo your action would be a lot more forgiving and less annoying, and ability to see all the levels and select next one if you're stuck at some level. Overall, really impressive and very well done!

@mykola Yeah, undo would definitely have been nice. If I'd had some extra time I would have added it.

@jrevel That's a fair point about the turning around all the time. Could maybe add a macro key for "dig, move, turn, place, turn". Not sure if that would interfere with learning the mechanics though.

Excellent puzzle game, I really liked the oxygen mechanic it placed a great constraint on the core digging and provided for some neat puzzle design.

love the pixel art, a great puzzle game that had me playing for quite a while, ill definitely be returning to this to get to through all the levels!

Cool game. really interesting mechanic with the oxygen supply. good puzzle design too. the only thing it could have done with is a "place dirt behind you" button to stop you turning around a bunch. great job overall!

This game for me was very difficult. And I hated to love it! It is very challenging and kept haunting me and calling me to come back and play it. In fact I think I will later today. :) Well done and thanks for sharing! :clap: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003785681?t=4h34m48s

this is a really nice change to all the 'just dig down' kind of games! like some others said, it's a little confusing to start with, but i got the concept in pretty quickly. at first, though, i thought it was a turn-based puzzle (ie. the bubbles go down when you move) instead of it being timed, so that took a while to realise, but otherwise it's pretty fun!! the controls are interesting. i personally never got to the end of the game since i'm terrible at puzzles and they've never really been my kind of games, but i liked this anyways :D

Super cool idea. I liked the mechanic a lot. It was very interesting and a new take on what I've seen before. All the sounds and graphics worked nicely with each other. I could see this being expanded upon a lot and turned into something really cool. Nice job!

That was a lovely game! I enjoyed the graphics a lot and the turn based puzzles were right up my alley. I did get stuck a lot once the levels started getting more open, however, I guess that was intentional to some extend. As a lot of other commenters have mentioned, figuring out the relation with the bubbles is not the most intuitive. For example, I had trouble figuring out whether I could dig and drop behind me five tiles before I ran out of air, or six. It would have been good to clarify somehow the exact point at which you lose a bubble, letting players calculate this very easily. Otherwise, I had a great time with it! :D P.S. - Another intuitive mechanic that I thought would be fun if you continue development: Pockets of air could partially refill your oxygen tank when you first run into them, while the ladder is an infinite source of air. However, this would probably require color coding pockets of air you haven't yet run into v/s those you have run into. So I guess this isn't very feasible for a jam game haha.

nicely done! interesting mechanic, and well-explored. I would have liked the ability to undo, load my previous progress, and for the controls to be a bit... different, somehow. (idk how, some UX wizardry so that you can turn and move with a single button when you want to, but only turn when you don't want to move. I have no idea how to solve this problem, but the controls as they are kept irking me)

really nicely done! I enjoyed this a lot, especially the extra levels

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007659333?t=01h52m12s

@pancelor thanks for playing! Really nice to get a surprise stream video (I've been trying to solicit video playthroughs here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/drilbert/video-rating-games with not much success so far). Agree about the movement, I think in a full version of the game I would introduce some sort of macro key for combined inputs, but only make it available after the player has demonstrated they understand the mechanics. EDIT: just looked at your upcoming game on your profile, it looks really cool! If you need a playtester, let me know (email is wheybags@wheybags.com)

@aditya-dave Thanks :) I actually had a similar thought. If I were to make an extended version I might add in powerup-style air bubbles as an item, that would refill your oxygen when you walk over them, but probably only the first time you do so.

@ty It actually is turn-based! :sweat_smile: Just wasn't explained well enough, but that's what I'm hoping to get out of this jam, learning better how to convey information to the player. Thanks for playing!

I'd love to see you play mine too, if you'd like! Unfortunately I didn't play the final levels of your game on stream, but I played for a good 20~40 minutes, I think.

hehe thank you re: Inbox Unbox! :smile: Thanks for reaching out; I'll write down your email!

Really clean and nice looking game! I didn't instantly understand that I was losing air bubbles when I was blocking the way but once I got it, I really enjoyed the puzzles.

Wow! I really loved that. Good work. I'd definitely like to see a post-jam version!

Clever little puzzle game! The oxygen added a nice real-time twist to what's usually a turn-based genre.

After a few levels part of it felt a bit too much like busywork for me, but I think that's just my personal preference and it was a definitely a good puzzle game.

Very innovative and unique, but oh so stressful! lol! Well done overall!

My friend, congratulations on your game, you managed to add the fun, the art and the puzzle, a suggestion for future upgrades would be to make it clearer the condition of losing air, it is still not intuitive, many times the person dies without to know, everything else is working fine, create a story and connect to your game and you will have a much larger audience, I hope I have helped, it is very good to know your work, a big hug.

WHY IS THE FILE SO HUGE???

@infinitycore it's... 130 mb? That's not really huge. It does have 3 copies of all the data, since the windows linux and mac versions are all in the one zip, but I mean... 130 mb...