Marianas Miner by Coda Highland
You have dug too deep!
Mining in the darkest depths of the deepest ocean for sunken treasure, you have unleashed the Cephaloids from the abyss beyond! Escape up to the surface before it's too late!
Controls
- Arrow Keys / WASD: Move
- Space: Shoot Harpoon
- Escape: Pause
To dig, press against the rock with the directional controls.
Navigate past the top of the map to win.
Instructions
Navigate your vessel from the depths of the ocean up to the surface. You will need to dig through earth and rock to escape from the undersea caverns.
Your submarine is equipped with a limited supply of harpoons. Harpoons can pin Cephaloids and can even pierce through a whole line of them for a combo bonus. You can pick up your harpoons that missed a Cephaloid, and you can find more harpoons amidst the treasures of the sea.
If a Cephaloid catches you, you lose a life. Your harpoon supply resets to 5 with each life.
Collect treasures and move toward the surface to score points. Extra lives are awarded every 25,000 points.
Scoring
- Gold: 500 points
- Diamond: 2000 points
- Chest: 5000 points
- Pinning a Cephaloid: 100 points + combo bonus
- Moving toward the surface: 10 points per foot of depth
- Extra life every 25,000 points
License
Software, graphics, and sound copyright (c) 2025 Adam Higerd
Title art copyright (c) 2025 Ginny Higerd
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
| Link | https://bitbucket.org/ahigerd/ld57/src/master/ |
| Link | http://greenmaw.com/webgames/ld57/ |
| HTML5 (alternate) | https://xmpps.greenmaw.com/~coda/ld57/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/marianas-miner |
Ratings
| Overall | 578th | 3.354⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 186th | 3.761⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 720th | 2.761⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 261th | 3.958⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 587th | 3.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 507th | 2.864⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 554th | 2.523⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 772th | 2.896⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 16🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
Taking your time to grind more points makes the game easier because of the extra lives. This was intentional: I wanted there to be a reward for drilling around in the depths of the map. It's also part of the game balance, because in the shallower waters it's easier for the Cephaloids to find you and the treasures aren't worth as much. It creates a small progression of difficulty through the game.
But what this ends up meaning is that more skilled players will actually have LOWER scores at the end. They'll need fewer lives to win, so there's less benefit in searching for treasure. The limited ammunition was intended to promote smart navigation and dexterous dodging, and the ammo refill when dying was intended as a mercy for players who get cornered. So that means players sprinting to the surface won't be engaging in as much combat to get points that way, either.
This means, in the end, I realize that my game mechanics work together to make a low-score competition an appealing way to play!
- running away creates a path for enemies to follow. Its stressful and forces you to come up with a strategy
- Managing harpoon resources makes it so you need to explore sometimes
@rainbeau @trevor-lentz Yeah, I wanted to write some music for it but I ran out of time -- I had to switch game engines 24 hours into the jam, because at some point between LD54 and now, something changed out from under me and now my bespoke game engine that I've put hundreds of hours of work into has become annoyingly flickery and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.
@veztron @tinykidtoo I'm glad you liked it. :) I intentionally made the enemy pathfinding work like that so you could set up moments to feel like you're awesome.
Thanks for this experience
The graphics and sounds were nice and I really liked the fact that there were multiple "biomes" that you went through. It really adds so much that there is variety in the looks and level generation at each stage of the game. It really motivated me to keep going to see how the game changes the closer I got to the surface.
Nice game and I liked it! :-)
@martta What OS and web browser are you using? I didn't use anything fancy at all for graphics; under the hood there might be a frame of lag here or there as it generates new parts of the map (because trying to generate the whole thing at once was REALLY laggy) but I don't think that should have caused ongoing lag.
I tried to make respawning as user-friendly as possible by making the enemies run away from you when you die and by giving you a full refill on ammunition and a period of invulnerability, but... yeah, if you really get swarmed in a corner that might not be enough.
@designernap That's heartwarming. :heart: I'm glad he enjoyed it! Maybe he can participate in a future game jam -- my son was 11 when he [made a game for LD42](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/running-out-of-space-3) and his game scored better than most of my games ever have!
@chuckeles Funny, I didn't code in any jump scares! :scream:
@eugenik @perrin I appreciate the feedback. :) I'll be sure to check your games out.
Good job, good job!
Now, what I would imagine would make it even cooler - goals to reach further depths? Maybe the further the depths the greater the amount of foes or sth?
Overall, very very enjoyable drilling game : ))
@aweskybear Yep, I used simplex noise with a threshold based on depth to make caves that thin out as you approach the surface. Converting that into a tilemap with nice edges and corners was a challenge but fortunately it was a challenge I solved back in LD44 and converted into library code.
I wrote a [post-mortem](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/marianas-miner/marianas-miner-post-mortem) where I discuss how I handled the game balance. I actually realized I wanted the enemies to get more numerous as you went UP in order to have good game progression. But if I had achievements then I could easily imagine one for touching the bottom of the map or something.
Wait.. caves are thinning out UP? That is why I was feeling it got more spacey when going down - I wanted to go the deepest depths naturally. x)
Obviously I missed the description :smile:
I will play again. xD
GJ