Neat game! I included your creation in my PROCJAM 2020 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look! :)
Play game
Auto-Miner's itch.io pageComments
a very relaxing game but the music is a bit different but it suit the situation which is that you are in a cave
suggestion:
1. pls expand the map or have some way to "open your map" rather than having a minimap and have the robots be clearly display since I can't tell whether one is a digger or a gatherer and it's kinda hard to tell where are they since they blend in with the map
2. it would be useful to have a counter on how many robots you have since I already lost track of only after 4 diggers XD
3. I think this is just my computer not strong enough but I can't finish the game(aka achievement) due to it crashing from all the caves that got dig up XD
4. CONTENT: more upgrades for the gatherer like instantly picking every gem in a cave or going to the nearest gem since they appear to travel at random which is find but hard to control, a new robot like a fighter that follows digger in case a threat comes from a cave or a new building like a teleport cause the cave gets BIG the more you play
either way good job :D
Submitted
RemodelThanks for playing!
So the map thing was sort of an afterthought. I wasn't originally going to have one, and have just have getting lost be part of the game. Then I figured once it gets bigger the map would be a nice efficiency to work toward, so I was going to map the map purchasable. Then I though, no, getting lost like this is just frustrating, and I made it free. So I didn't end up spending a lot of time on it. If I end up adding to it, improving the map would definitely be in the plans.
I like the robot counter idea. Maybe I'll just make a detailed stats screen that shows you all the numbers.
About how many caves did you get to before crashing? I did a fast-forward run on my computer and got thousands fine, but it's also a new computer, so it makes sense that other machines would struggle. Plus I added some things after the test that maybe I didn't optimize right. Honestly I wasn't expecting people to actually shoot for thousands of caves. Most people tend to play jam games for only like five minutes. But I find endless games kind of boring without any real milestones, so I added the achievements and made a couple of them that I thought were kind of insane just in case people were playing for that long.
I actually have this whole list of other upgrades I never got to. Robots that dig vertically and place ladders, teleporters, decorative landmarks, surveybots that post arrows pointing toward rare gem pockets, etc. I just started to get burnt out / run out of time and didn't end up getting to those ideas, but maybe they'll make a showing in a future update.
A very fun concept! Wonder how it works internally - guess there’s a lot of computational geometry involved.
A few suggestions:
- The gem collectors should probably look for the closest gem, or use some other optimizing strategy, otherwise they just move in weird patterns and it is much faster to collect the gems yourself
- The map should probably somehow indicate different levels, i.e. when one cave is above another & where the player is
Great job!
Submitted
VenusThanks for playing! Yup, I had to compute every vertex, triangle, and uv. I'm probably going to make a video later to go in depth on the process.
With the gem collection, I cheated a bit and was relying on a quirk of how the rooms are generated. Every point in the room is visible from the center, so it was easiest to send robots back to the center after each task instead of try to do some actual pathfinding. With more time, a smarter collection strategy like you say would certainly be an improvement. But I wasn't really aiming for it to be faster than collecting it yourself, more just a way to divide your attention. When you have multiple robots, you can send one robot one way with a collector and then personally follow the other robot without having to run to the opposite side of the cavern maze.
The map is likewise very simple. Just a top-down camera view. There was no simple way to get the elevation of all the rooms, since it is determined by random slopes in the tunnels, and the rooms aren't assigned to any particular "level". The geometry isn't even stored in separated meshes. I could maybe lower the map camera to just past the last raycast hit before hitting the player, and then reduce the culling distance by casting another ray upward. I'll have to play around with that and see if that works or if it just cuts off too much of the map.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.