Digsite Simulator by PerfectSquare
A game about digging and finding things. See how much you can find before your funds run out!

Note: Historical accuracy and realism were not prioritized during development.
| Link | https://github.com/jennstubley/LD48-Source |
| Link | https://jennstubley.github.io/LD48/index.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/digsite-simulator |
Ratings
| Overall | 295th | 3.636⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 279th | 3.595⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 160th | 3.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 29th | 4.381⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 309th | 3.667⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 525th | 3.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
Don't know if I'm cheating by just clicking around instead of dragging my mouse, but I guess judging from my screenshot it's not helping me find stuff. lol
Love the concept for your game, it brings back memories from playing a certain Magic School Bus Dinousaur PC Game as a kid. Adding music is the only improvement suggestion I have.
I loved it, very good job :clap:
Maybe add some randomness on discoveries to have replayability.
:two_hearts:
One thing I think would have made for a substantial improvement would have been steadily darker soil colours. As it is, once you've torn up the ground a bit it can get very difficult to tell what it is you're trying to dig. Really nice little game overall, though: very satisfying to gradually clear out whole upper layers while you're poking around trying to find things on the lower ones. Like others I'd appreciate some sound effects, but I'm actually not sure it really needs background music. If you did turn it into a mobile game, for example, it's the sort of thing I might tap away at while watching TV so might just mute that anyway.
Some points:
* Nice graphics!
* It was a bit confusing to me that the large discoveries do not disappear after being unearthed (as the small ones do).
* Gameplay was very relaxing initially, but turned slightly stressful (or work-like) later, when almost everything was discovered and I was basically clicking madly to find that last coin. ("That last coin" is figurative, the game started feeling worse more or less after I finished the three big discoveries.)
* This coincides with my change of strategy: in the beginning I felt like someone digging an archaeologic site, carefully removing layers of earth as I followed some object. In the final part I was more like drilling, going deeper at rnadom points.
* By the way, that exposed t-Rex tail in the beginning of the game, and the fact that it gradually goes to lower layers worked beatifuly as a concealed tutorial. Beautiful design!
* As others said, I think this could work well as a mobile/touch game.
* The coloring of the layers was confusing sometimes ("hmm, is this color above or below that one?")
* Whenever the borders of many different layers were close to each other, this made playing on that part of the screen fell worse. It was difficult to understand how deep I was, it was almost impossible to dig as a proper archaeologist (and instead I just clicked rapidly). Maybe if you require a certain distance between borders (like, to require a gentle digging slope, forbidding "deep wells").
* I suspect that the game would work better if there were less layers. (Better in the sense that it would tend to feel more like in the beginning of the game, which I liked more.)
Thanks for making this game! A nice one!
Congratulations on your entry!