earthmover by dishwand

earthmover
this is a tile-based puzzle game about earth melting & being bad at your job. it should take about 20-30 minutes to fully complete
- wasd to move
- space to extend/retract your piston arm
- hold r to restart
about
used unity, blender, aseprite, and massive synth. i wrote a theme for game but decided to omit it because i preferred the atmosphere without it!
i hope you enjoy :) please let me know what you think. if you are very stuck, you can hold p to skip the level (kinda)
| Link | https://github.com/dishwand/ld53/ |
| Link | https://dishwand.github.io/dishwand/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/earthmover |
Ratings
| Overall | 116th | 3.776⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 186th | 3.448⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 125th | 3.586⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 365th | 3.017⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 127th | 3.828⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 104th | 3.621⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 120th | 3.304⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 110th | 3.643⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 47🗨️ |
@sinusquell hehe, i had fun plucking together some random sound effects, glad they worked for ya!
@jk5000 thanks for playing! i definitely cranked the difficulty up, perhaps a bit much ;)
@josemwarrior thank you! glad some of the humor shone through
@liven thanks for trying it though! in retrospect the game is a bit tough :)
@elementary appreciate the feedback! yeah, i think i was a little numb to how disorienting the movement mechanic is at first after playing it so long. would like to smoothen out the intro if i ever did something with the idea again!
@ollie-d hehe, glad someone caught the bloxorz inspiration!
And I already wanted to give a minus score for not having music, then I read that you wanted to add a theme but the atmosphere was better without it and I fully agree. It's better without music and just some ambient sound.
Saying that, I feel kinda funny. Not to plug, but we have a similar game with similar controls (did not work on that), but you too have used a set of booster rockets on the side to visualize thrusters, turning and speed. Just like our artist did. Looks like this is the way its done irl and you two are on the same vibe :D
And the puzzle design is great as well. Very cute, having the player move around to "find the PDA", but it's really to train them on the controls. My favorite level was the one with all the ramps. It had several great catches to figure out how to set up movement for future sections of the level. I think the pushable blocks and ice blocks had the most interesting designs. They force you to think ahead and how moves now will affect the future.
But then you committed game design cardinal sin #1: Making you sit through unskippable dialogue whenever you want to retry. But the real pain was the lack of an undo button. I was really wishing I had that once I got to the falling blocks. It sucks to have to restart the level from the beginning every time I want to try a new way of moving through the ice. It just goes to show that no matter how much work you put into fancy shaders, weather palette shift effects, custom assets, and ambience, it never matters more than the gameplay.
I didn't finish the game. I played for over an hour and got to this point:

I got the crate into the chute, but then the exit was revealed and I did not have the proper ice blocks left to angle myself at the exit. That's pretty messed up, considering I had no way of knowing where the exit would appear beforehand. It was a pretty fun level too and I felt clever for beating it. So the realization that I would have to restart felt like a cruel joke at my expense.
But despite those issues, it is a super fun and engaging puzzle game. I am so impressed on how much you created here as a solo project in two days. Fantastic job, seriously!
I was also wondering if this is an original idea or did you see the mechanics somewhere else, since now I want to play more games like this.
I actually ended up coming back to this game, so you definitely did something right. I don't know why, but I kept thinking about it after playing it.
I loved your water effect especially! I will definitely have to check out that mat/shader.
Shocked this was a compo game - your art and audio and writing really came together to present such a wonderful little slice of life.
I do feel really bad for Bell swishing around in that little metal box though...can't be comfortable!
Edit: I also meant to suggest extending the dialogue background to full width since some of the text was overflowing.
Good job!
@zealous-coder one of the tiles in that level has a dark blue square on it! would have liked to put a better visibility texture / model instead
@chuckiee totally agree about the skipping text. thanks for checking it out though!
@stefan-funke i definitely noticed this about the core concept. i think some of the later puzzles do a better job at emphasizing planning out your moves vs. randomly moving around. so if i ever did anything with this idea in the future, i'd love to smooth out the beginning to force the player to get a better understanding of the character movement!
@coderaurus thanks for the compliments! the dialogue overflowing was an intentional choice actually, i thought it was kind of endearing!
@cinterre definitely was an inspiration! thanks for checking my game out, even if you weren't great at it :D
People have already mentioned some of the issues I've found (like the need to have skippable dialogue), so there's not much for me to add here. One thing I'd perhaps consider adding is some sort of indicator telling the player what to do at the beginning of the game - if the player needs to just "roll around a bit", perhaps showing some sort of counter, counting down with each "step" to show the player they are actually doing something (right) instead of just rolling around in confusion. Or maybe some sort of objective list in the corner of the window? Something like "move around (0/30)", "connect to the hook", "move package into the delivery slot".
The sound design is great too. With such a chill mood it's easy to make simple and small sound effects feel jarring, but you've made them just as relaxing as the rest of the game. Perhaps it could use some slow mellow tune in the background, but the sound of the waves on its own felt pretty good.
actually, about halfway through the development i started to realize that the core puzzle mechanic was, as others have described, a little bit cumbersome. i think the "language" that the player learns as they figure out how to control the cube is actually much better suited to a fast paced puzzle-arcade game. so, thanks so much for sending Devil Dice, i'd never heard of it and this game is fascinating!