After a long hiatus from doing Ludum Dare (Not really, I've participated in LD44, LD45, LD46, all of which were uncompleted), I'm back and completed my first ever Compo event, and the game is called Drilling Rig.

I'm delighted with the result I have made for Drilling Rig, especially for my first Compo event. Even though I did not complete all the features I wanted to implement, I got a decent number of features.

However, this game may seem incomplete or look more or less like a simple prototype to some of you. You may be correct on that, but I had no direction with what to do with the game, in all honesty. I had ideas of what I could implement, yes, but the game has no goal, mainly because of the chosen theme: Deeper and Deeper.

This theme was on my list of not being chosen because it's too simple. Much like the game that I have produced, what is the game/theme supposed to achieve? The feature I was planning on (continuing to implement) was an entire economic system. With the materials you mine, you can sell the materials and gain money to upgrade your driller. I did not fully implement this feature as I was unsure of the purpose of upgrading the driller would be.

Maybe there's a speed upgrade or a bigger drill-bit upgrade to dig more blocks at once. How would you progress in a single level game? Make the player achieve all the upgrades? In my eyes, this theme is similar to completing a game that has no replayability; for example, take "The Beginner's Guide", which takes roughly 2 hours to complete. Even though there's no "achievement" in the game, you understand the story it guides you through. Once you have finished the game, however, when you replay it, you already know what's happened, so the game doesn't make much more of an impact than what it made the first time. Now don't get me wrong, there is a severe difference between replayability and enjoyment. But how many times can you replay the same game before you start to lose enjoyment?

Anyway, here's my summed up Post-Mortem for Drilling Rig!

The good things:

In comparison to Solar Engulfment and Caprae Mortem, I have improved by a ton. The most obvious thing about this improvement is the World Generation. In any game that includes some landscape, I want that landscape to be procedurally generated (unless the game has a story of some sort). So the player can have a unique experience from any other player, similar to Minecraft, Equilinox or Astroneer. Though the World Generation script is not very efficient due to the generation of many cube prefabs, thus rendering many vertices. It is an excellent start to world generation with different materials and processes. If I were to implement caves or the like, I think I would have perfected a simple voxel World Generation script.

The bad things

As mentioned before, I could not implement the features I wanted, an economic system, possible upgrades, and others. Again, I think this is more or less due to the theme that people chose rather than the game I produced. If the theme was something similar to "Deeper and Darker" or the like, maybe I could have come up with a thrilling game where you would have to avoid contact with monsters deeper you go in the depths of darkness. Whilst with "Deeper and Deeper", it is just too vague to get a good game idea or game with a sense of replayability.