That's where the lost lemming went! Nice pixel art!

Best game so far. I looks so good and it has optically so much to offer. For me it was a little too dark in some spots. Also I got stuck, cause i thrw my stone into a spot i could not reach it again, cause the enemies blocked me.
Hope you get a lot positive feedback. Have a good time!

it's actually insane how much you managed to do in such a short amount of time. love the art and the overall vibe. had similar issues like @psychomonster but nothing super serious. great entry!

@psychomonster Thanks! (And thanks to the others, too!)
Any tile you mine has a chance to drop a rock - a bit of an unclear mechanic, unfortunately :')

Have it on my list of games i want to play again, so now i know to receive stones again. Thanks for the hint.

Love it. Took a little getting used to all the controls and that I could easily mine for stone. After that it was smooth sailing.

Two things I didn't like: First, on my laptop it was a pain to redirect my cursor, I personally would have preferred an option to mine/throw bombs in the direction I was moving. I'm sure on desktop it's a much easier experience and better. Second, I had no idea what any other collectibles were for besides stones. Maybe I missed it, maybe it's a mechanic that you haven't implemented yet, but they felt kinda meaningless because I had infinite lives and energy (both of which I enjoyed immensely, made for a very cozy/chill game).

One thing I really loved: the variation in tiles! I felt like I had just about seen the gist of the game when I got to the city tiles, and then the same when I got to the pink (crystal?) tiles. Both of them were interesting and made me want to keep playing/exploring. I stopped for now but wonder what other stuff there is to see deeper down.

cool looking game. I got stuck right at the beginning, I think I may have fallen through the floor or something? Also, the game was full screen and I could not figure out how to exit, escape didn't do anything and F11 didn't do anything, I ended up having to alt+f4

@boboneoone there's no way to get stuck! you can mine and grapple out of any situation :)

It's a really awesome game! I really liked the main character, he's so funny and cute! The only thing that was a bit off is the darkness, it was a bit hard to navigate. But the character is just top-notch, it's a pleasure to play. The graphics are also great! Overall, it's a really cool project!

Nice short game! I almost thought my journey was pointless with so many repeating structures until I saw a small hut and touched it.
Aside of rocks which require mining to gather, I don't seem to find other resources to be useful especially water which is always 0. Despite my resources, I could mine and survive easily, and no, the blue monster could be shot to death easily. The only hurdle I dealt is digging my way which takes time.

Really satisfying, well-presented, trippy, and chill game. Enjoyed how you go through all kinds of different environments and throwing rocks at enemies good player feedback. I wasn't really sure what to do with the resources other than the rocks though, and I don't think I ever found another fountain besides the one at the starting point. In any case, nicely done!

Wow, really impressive! There's a lot of content, exploration is fun and the graphics are super nice. Great job!

Wow, really impressive! There's a lot of content, exploration is fun and the graphics are super nice. Great job!

I am impressed by people that make such polished games in jam.
Good job, graphics are cool, sounds as well. The idea in interesting and the atmosphere is great.

Haha, quite fun character! I love animation frames, how it jumps and smashes everything with his pick.

Nice pixel art and a nice polish aswell ! Maybe it does need a tutorial of what you need to do in the game tho. And be careful it might feel like two music loops are playing at the same time at some point. Great work !

@lepol no tutorial, nothing to do in the game - you are free! :)
otherwise yes, the tracks crossfade horribly. I couldn't spare time for that...

Very cool, I'm impresed by the quality, what kind of C# engine are you using if I may ask?

Very impressive amount of content for a compo game! I liked the variation as you go deeper. Like some of the others I also didn't really understand the resources other than the rocks, but I had fun just digging away and throwing rocks at the enemies.

Very complete game - great graphics, animations and varied environments, very good music and audio, fluid controls, and overral solid tried and true gameplay

I wanted to finish the game, but it wasn't clear to me how far I was from home (I saw 00 on the top right after a while), and the game became a little repetitive. Also I wasn't sure what the mushrooms and bottle do.

However, it's really an impressive for a game jam - great in all departments really

@r8teful Thank you! It's Monogame: https://monogame.net/
This makes me realize I forgot to list my tools... will do so later!

Amazing job, also kudos on using your own tech, respect ;)

Love the art, the music, everything in general, it is an amazing entry <3

I really liked how the grappling hook acted as a jump button while moving, but had increased functionality beyond that.

Great entry! At first I was afraid the light is a bit too dim, but luckily you can increase it with flames. Liked the different biomes you added, especially the city was cool and unexpected. The controls felt good. The blue round enemy got a bit too often spawned for me, but otherwise fun game!

Such beautiful game! I only have minor feedbacks: I think music got a little too energetic for what's going on, and going below 100 reset the counter to 00 so I was super sad. I also want to ask if there is an ending screen :eyes:

@chuckiee there is!

Cool! The main character and the monsters are very cute! I really liked acquiring the flames for additional light. The mushrooms slowly healing you was neat, too. I have no idea what the water did, and at low enough levels, I could not find any fountains to replenish it either! I wish I found more uses of the grappling hook!

Hylde made it home :-)

huh that was a pretty long way.. Very nice little game!

Oh my god!! What??? How is it possible you made a jam game with such depth (heh) - and it's compo??
I am flabbergasted - I can't imagine how you managed to make that much pixel art in 48hr - let alone all the enemy variances, coding, balance, and all the rest.

I absolutely adored every moment with this game - from the glee of finding another charming fountain, to the excitement of seeing a new block type harbinger a new level of depth, to carefully observing each new enemy to learn it's behavior, lest I waste any of my precious health.
The visuals were chunky and adorable, the particles made the vegetation feel alive, and each enemy puts a fun new spin on both executing combat, as well as finding (or making!) a suitable, safe 'arena' to give you the advantage! Shockingly engrossing game loop.

I kept expecting the content to 'fall apart' at some point - but what shocked me most, is the level generation seemed to get even smarter and more well tailored the deeper I got!
And the end screen was so lovingly made as well - chefs kiss!

As a huge fan of spelunky - this was right up my alley - the combo of a pickaxe and rope-toss is unmatched, haha.

Honest - I would love to know more about your ethos for game making - what tools did you use for the pixel art? The music? How did you go about handling unique world generation on such a short time budget?

Really, you should be incredibly proud, this is a monumentally polished game. Well done!

dang this is great! im amazed at how much content there is. i had a really fun time exploring the different areas and figuring out what everything meant. really nice art and effects, and the music and sounds fit very well. i got a bit stuck in the last area but otherwise i had a really great time digging down :) nice job!

@ugly-robot Thanks! I can give you a little rundown for sure -

For pixel art, I use Aseprite. I don't really have anything spectacular to note here, I just use a style that's convenient and quick to draw with.
Music is made within Ableton, this time using Synth1, my guitar and some drum machine samples; here too, I'm used to a process that's pretty quick and simple.
World generation is a thing I play with a lot in and outside of jams; this technique consists in creating sample "rooms" (you probably noticed those repeating in places, if not, fantastic for me!) who all attempt to generate one after the other by connecting via "doors". The game tries to pack as many as possible together at all times in the background - if you somehow clip through the ground, you can end up moving faster than world generation and you'll see it operate. I spent a big portion of the first day coding in an infinite chunk system and that generation method.

I'll gladly answer any other questions; cheers!

@fusionnist woah! Wow - thank you for the detail - I thought for sure the world gen was 'one shot' and just the enemies were spawned runtime. Infinite generation for a jam - thats crazy, haha! Awesome.

The generation felt, from my players perspective, totally seamless and unique throughout. Just for my own sense - how many 'rooms' did you have to make to achieve this?
(I've always wanted to approach something like this (I think spelunky uses a similar room/door approach) - but I always figured 'well, to sell it, you'd need more rooms than it's possible to make in a weekend' - but you have handedly proven my intuition wrong!)

And your alacrity with aseprite also assists this, it seems - all the faster to make new-looking rooms if you have a wider palette of tiles to choose from (I assume).

I'll have to check out that world gen code - I've got a wave func collapse algo that's been 'on ice' for whenever a jam seems like I should use it. (Frankly, idk why I didn't think of using it with 'depth' - went in a totally different direction - but there's always more jams!)

Honestly - crazy to hear it's just aseprite, ableton and monogame - I assumed* you must have some content-gen shortcuts, but you're just really good at what you do!
And an incredibly efficient worker. Hats off to you!

edit: assumed* not assume

@ugly-robot Yeah, spelunky does do something similar! I believe its system places room parts in a grid, instead. Per "biome", I had ~12 rooms, the starting one had 15. To my eyes that was sort of a bare minimum though. And I think the sell would wear out faster if players *had* to focus on individual rooms (say, were there traps or precision platforming or really recognizable landmarks).
The tileset ended up surprisingly small this time around - if you have Tiled, you can actually go check it out in the game files, that plus the map containing all the rooms.
Not too sure what content-gen shortcuts might be; the only real "shortcut" I have is my code library, but it doesn't go beyond base classes and helpers, all things that engines feature by default ;)

@fusionnist awesome - thank you for the details! And great point about how much the player is-or-isn't required to focus on the rooms, thus allowing them to 'flow' into eachother, as the enemies (and thus the challenge) can move from room to room as well. Very cool!

And whoops! Sorry I mean to say "I assumed* you must have some content-gen shortcuts" not "I assume..."

Just to clarify fully, by 'shortcuts' - I just mean that I always like hearing about new helpful niche tools. Like the first time I heard of 'sfxr' - a tool like that can be a godsend for jams. Beforehand, I assumed that all these atari-like sfx were, like, hand-made with oscillators in a tool like audacity or something (which is certainly possible) - and thus I would never be able to add them to my jam games. But, then when you discover wonderful tools like that - it suddenly opens up that new world of content.

But aseprite and ableton are "the real deal"! I'll just have to sit down and practise more!
Thank you for the inspiration!

@ugly-robot Oh yeah for sure, I was super lucky to learn about sfxr a while back and I use it all the time, such as here. A fun thing you can do is "mutate" a sound a few times, download each mutation that sounds right and use them at random to have cheap variation, so that repeating sounds like shooting sound more organic.

The pixel art was good, but the gameplay felt a little lack luster, I felt like I didn't really have a choice (because nothing mattered) or that there was any purpose, but a solid frame nevertheless.

- It was too dark in the beginning, where I could barely see under my character, but fortunately while going down the light became bigger and more abundant. Also while jumping the light moved with the player and I could see tiles I wasn't supposed to.
- There was a big variety of tiles, but they all seemed to be the same, giving rock and taking the same time to mine, so there was no reason to dig anywhere else than under you (or going to a cave that goes deeper)
- The blue ghost was a bit annoying when there were 2 in 1 and coming from the bottom while digging.
- The numbers wrapped around making it confusing when going from 99 to 00 (I found the house on -66 the second time)
- The jump felt under powered being able to jump only 1 square ad I often confused it with grappling hook as that gave more movement ability
- I get that the point is to dig down, but sometimes it would be cool to be able to dig up or on the grappling hook to get to spaces where you can dig down faster.

This feels a bit familiar, haha. Not sure if my game from last year was the inspiration for this
but if so I think your take on it is much better than mine was :D. I also get a strong "Lemmings" vibe
not just from the character but also from the various environments and music, which is great.

These were the steps I used to run on Linux, in case this helps someone:
- Install ASP.NET core runtime version 8 from microsoft's website
- Copy `<game dir>/x64/libfmod.so` up one level to `<game dir>/libfmod.so` and rename it to `libfmod.dll`
- Run using `dotnet "Cave of Gorbs.dll"`

I got a lot of terraria vibes from your game. good job, really like the art and animations

The atmosphere is amazing and the game feel really satisfying to play. Impressive amount of stuff for a compo, for sure. Overall, one of my favorites from this jam!

looks great, feels great, just slow, and tedious. Art and music was totally on point man.

Best game so far this jam. It really reminds me of a combination of animal well, spelunky and noita in all the best ways possible. Can really imagine a full game of this, filled with secrets and hidden mechanics and stuff. Amazing work!