I like the concept! I found it a little challenging, but it was satisfying when I dug something up. :)

It was surprisingly hard to find things!

Also, it's not a huge deal for a game like this, but it's always nice when LD games can be paused.

hard game... clean graphics and easy to understand the goal :)

Interesting gameplay! The interface is clear, and it’s easy to understand what to do.

The keyboard controls felt a bit unintuitive to me—it seems like they’re mapped to the canvas directions rather than the character’s orientation, which might be due to how the mouse interaction is set up. Fun game.

Neat idea: I assume the "hitboxes" for the chunks are circles? That's what it felt like, anyway — it was fun trying to figure out the shape just by scanning over. Am I crazy, or did the "restart level" button kick me back to the main menu?

I too found the movement a bit unintuitive. I wanted to be able to walk the character directly forward or backward (aligned with the direction I was pointing the detector). Despite that, I didn't have much trouble digging things up on the first try if I took my time to move back and forth across them a few times first. I made it to the credits (but why are they so slow?). I appreciated the clear instructions and the fact that the instructions screen was available in-game!

Nice game concept. I had no issues detecting: the approximate position of the metal chunks, or which type of metal was nearby, or if the detected metal was a dud. However, I found it difficult to pinpoint the exact (or close enough) position of the metal with the audio queue alone. It would have been nice to have a way to detect distance, or cross reference multiple readings. Maybe with rendering a small disappearing visual queue at the approximate position of the reading. Alternatively, the volume of the beeps could be loosely mapped to the distance of the detector to the metal – that way one could better estimate the position of the metal chunks.

Yaaayyy I won!!! :tada:
Thank you so much for having a level-based restart system, when I lost at lvl 2 I was so afraid of having to restart from scratch lol.
Very simple mechanic, but well balanced, finding the pieces of metal was the right level of hard.
The game is also quite polished, except for the graphics of the main game (but they're efficient), it's nice to have clear instructions, and a title screen (with some nice music too)!
About the theme, it's there, but I would say maybe a bit weakly? but that's just a personal feeling, that maybe changing the "meter" info to a "depth" info for example would've added a bit more of... idk, 3D feeling lol.
Anyway thanks for this game!

Thank you all for the great feedback!

@foxecho @kalgynirae Thanks for your thoughts on what you expected for the movement. That really helps!

@caeonosphere The hitboxes are actually rectangles! I found them harder to pinpoint, but it seems like I may have made the game too difficult :sweat_smile: As for the restart button sending you back to the main screen, that sounds like a bug!

@suvi Those are great suggestions! I may pick this up in a week and implement those polish suggestions. Thanks!

@alyd-asmar Thanks so much for the feedback! The depth meter is a great idea! I'll put this on the polish list for when I pick this game back up.

@alphabetasoup Looking forward to the post-jam update!

never saw a metal detector game before but now I am asking myself why not :)

Interesting gameplay and concept. I had no issues with the controls, just the sound cues could have been more indicating and be rather a constant beeping that gets faster the closer you are (like a parking sensor), I had some issues checking where exactly I was supposed to dig.

Good work overall!

Very nice game! I hope you develop this idea more because it is good.
Passed the game, I had to fail a few times before I get how to deal with this.

Great job! You did very well!

easy to understand but seems very hard to play

It was really addictive

It took me a while to understand, but once I reread the directions and realized I could watch the frequencies to know whether I was near something, I was able to get through a few levels. In the third level, I started getting messages that said "Garbage!" and I'm wondering what that means. Was I just fooled into picking up garbage instead of gold, or am I just really bad at the game hahaha