Payback Pit by Alem26
Delve into the mine and try to get your hands on the precious ores hidden in the depths of the neverending pit to repay your debt from the overworld!
With your trusty pulley, pickaxe and musket even the angered creatures of the deep won't have a chance to stand between you and your riches!
....is what you tell yourself at least.
Collect ore with your pulley, sell it to the shop, slay aggressive monsters, improve your chances of wealth and upgrade your gear in this action-management adventure!
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This entire game and every 3D-asset, 2D-art, sound effect and animation you see and hear (with exception of the music) has been custom made from scratch in the last 72 hours for this jam!
As per ususal with downloadable games, Windows might classify the file as "not save" due to its unknown origin, which is normal and nothing to be worried about.
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CONTROLS:
LMB: Shoot weapon / attack with pickaxe
RMB: Switch weapon
R: Reload musket
E: Collect ore, start pulley, interact with shop / upgrade table / selling chest
E hold: Lower pulley (spin handle)
Space: Jump
* W, A, S, D:* Walk
Esc: Pause
CREDITS:
Alexander May: Programming, Sound design, Game design
Lena Würbach: 3D-modeling / -animation (characters), 2D-artwork (UI-design + menu screen)
Luca Spirka: Programming, 3D-modeling (environment)
Thomas Kontny: Game design, 3D-modeling (environment, items)
Jannick Elfers: 2D-artwork (death- / winscreen)
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There is now an updated PostJam version available, which simply fixes some of the occured bugs and a few balance changes with an overall increase in difficulty. It's the exact same game, just a bit more quality of life!
| Link | https://layered-lena.itch.io/payback-pit |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/payback-pit |
Ratings
| Overall | 447th | 3.547⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 522th | 3.25⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 453th | 3.219⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 269th | 3.953⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 479th | 3.563⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 341th | 3.438⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 488th | 3.484⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 46🗳️ | 49🗨️ |
The gun play felt great as well altough I thing you could increase the frequency of enemy spawns a bit
One thing I noticed when selling ore, I could never get all my ore numbers to zero. There was always one pesky ore sitting in my inventory, no matter how many times I pressed E. XD
We are really happy that you all enjoyed playing our game!
As you have noticed, there are a few minor UI and perhaps collision bugs that we weren't able to fix in time, some values don't update when they should.
There will always be 1 ore left in your inventory (but it's just an illusion, don't trust it) and the gemstone ui also just updates occasionally ;)
Hope you still have a good time!
@trevor-lentz The enemies do actually drop a ressource! It's the red gemstone points under your money. If you have 10 of them, you can press E onto the (slightly too small) sign next to the pulley and increase the ore-value of your next pull significantly :)
The combat was decent - I liked the visuals for the enemies. The two enemies that I experienced felt fairly similar and I could kite both of them using melee attacks to not take any damage.
Adding in some ranged enemies would really switch things up.
Having some tooltips on the interactables would help with making it 100% clear what you're buying before you spend on something. Having text show up when you're near an interactable prompting you (Press E to Lower) would help with making interactions easier to understand.
All of the interactions themselves felt pretty solid. Fun game!
Overall, solid work!
Thanks for playing and the information!
The mouse sensitivity is good to know, I will add a sensitivity slider for the fixed / updated version coming to itch.io tomorrow.
The lags are unfortunate, it might be because of the lighting method (Lumen) that requires some raytracing capabilities.
- there are tons of ore types you can see in UI but you don't influence which one you get and you just sell all of it right away, so, in fact you don't really care, but UI make it looks like it is important.
- There are many different places, like, shop, selling point, upgrades shop, You need to interact with which one separately and while they are in a single "zone", it still feels like they are quite distant from each other and are separate places you have to "keep in mind in figuring out". I think making just one place would've simplify perception and make them feel more player-friendly.
- You forced to sell ore one by one, and that just feels irritating, cause you have to take care about alot already - reloading, dodging monsters, getting the ore, etc.
So, it's all pretty minor stuff that can be solved one way or another, but my general impression is - I, as a player, was a bit overwhelmed by stuff. So, I think the experince in general can benefit from having maybe less - but more polished and simplified features\mechanics.
Anyway, amazing, how you guys managed to get so many things done, great job making a game!
About the things you listed:
1. correct, the ores all do basically do the same thing, they just have different selling values and are for visual variation. A few less would have also done the job, that's true, it was a bit of a hassle to change all of them each in some cases when a change was made as well ;)
2. good to know that you had a bit of a difficulty figuring out the places, we hoped that the custom signs would be enough but we'll keep that in mind in the future!
3. yep, the ore selling wasn't supposed to be like that, but we had no time anymore to reprogram the selling feature again and it ended up being an unintended button meshing ""mechanic"" that can be quite annoying I agree
In the future we will try to have less feature creep and rather 1 or 2 core mechanics that we spend our time on! The artists in our time would also really appreciate that ;)
Either way, great work on this one, congrats on a successful jam!