good entry. Its a simple number-go-up game so you dont need much but you still need to keep it tight.

I dont think the inventory serve a purpose? Not sure if I can check maximum inventory until after I failed taking an ore.

The visuals are well made! All character sprites are cute!

I like the UI and the input prompts that pop up to guide the player.

Exploring downwards kept bringing up new shops with goodies and upgrades. I like that too!

Played until day 7 and dug down until I reached some creepy place with bloody test pods or something like that. Saw some "Save us" signs at some point before that. Wow, wasn't expecting a dark turn in the game.

You really can keep grinding and grinding in this game. I wonder what happens at day 30.

From reading other comments I saw there's a boss fight below? I may come back to this game later and see what it's about!

Some improvement suggestions:

- I don't think I heard the music? Maybe I turned the volume down too much but I could only hear the clink clink mining sfx.

- I wish Kaela could mine while jumping.

- There needs to be a way to drop stuff from inventory to make space for other items. I found some uniquely different item but inventory was full.

- Somehow I ended up talking with CC GG at the office but there was no sprite visible? Same with the consumable shop, it's responding to clicks but not visible. Oh, I found Koyori in the next room below and now she's in the consumable shop spot.

- Inventory capacity is not clear when opening the Inventory window. I wish it showed a number that can be used to track how many more items can be picked up.

- I think there's fall damage? Somehow my HP was halfway down when I checked but I didn't remember getting hit by any falling rocks until that point. Would be nice to give the player better feedback when taking damage.

Very fun game!

I played the game for a lot longer then I expected,  and just want to share a moment in this game that actually made me go "oh crap" and really encourage me to keep playing.

As I was digging I noticed the Down arrows and "Keep Digging" signs. And I thought those were nice. They helped me realize that I still had ways to go. However... the moment I saw the "Save us!" sign I was suddenly REALLY curious and determined to beat the game.

When I got to the room with the lab and the bloodstains everywhere, I REALLY REALLY wanted to beat the game and figure out the mystery. Unfortunately I think the game doesn't really build too much further upon it (maybe for time reasons). But the curiosity I had made me keep playing and digging. I think things like that are really powerful and shows how useful of a tool mystery can be. I feel like you started with something cool there and gave me a moment I didn't see in any other jam game so far this time around.

I did appreciate the Boss fight at the bottom to mix it up. It was a nice thing that was different from the rest of the gameplay. I feel like it was a bit too memey maybe? And an ending dialogue would actually add so much.

Uhh... random other comments. I feel like most of these fall under the "Probably just ran out of time" style of critique, which isn't too helpful, but I thought I would list it out anyways.

- Gems and Ores could use a name. It helps a bit with immersion.
-The Artifacts you dig up could also be made more immersive if they had a name you could see somewhere. I thought finding Artifacts were really cool, and here is where just a little bit of flavor text and a name can really help with the whole sense of mystery. 
- Some way to tell the value of Ores in the inventory screen could be useful.
- Jetpack ramps up in speed very quickly once you upgrade it, making it very hard to control.
- Taking damage when falling could use some kind of indicator. I actually didn't realize how low my health was getting due to this.
- One actual point. I THINK the water you run into is an indicator for when you run out of time. I think this ended up confusing some people who thought that they dug too deep or something. If this is the case, I think a simple transition like a fade to black with some text could have avoided this problem.
- Sprite art is nice! I'm guess you drew most of it for this jam.

"Grind" was real for this one thats for sure!

Last two areas definitely took a while to get through, when trying to play properly, but once you get all the pickaxe upgrades you can just dig straight down to the boss, so that kinda balances it out a little bit.

There should have been some kind of indicator after fighting the boss though - I won, and tried to jump over them, but the speed boost from the jetpack launched me up and I died to fall damage, so I dug all the way back down in case there was something in the arena I needed, just to fight him again and realize there was nothing else, so I had to teleport back and come to terms with the fact that I wasted close to 10 minutes or so.

I also noticed that you could interact with the stores without them being found - I was able to buy from Shiori and AutoFister shops without having found them yet by standing and clicking in their area. Didn't check with Koyori, but I would figure its possible. Also after unlocking her (Koyori) Cece and Gigi just kinda showed up, not sure if I managed to sequence break there, or it was intentional.

But there's a lot of content here, which is impressive, and the art, music, SFX, and general vibes are all really nice. Great job putting this together!

These incremental digging games are always relaxing to play through as long as the balance is done right. I think the first few upgrades were fine in terms of pacing, maybe could be slightly faster or have more smaller upgrades at a cheaper cost. The exponential scaling you had makes it hard to gauge progress since the numbers jump by 30x after a single upgrade. The last section didn't feel good because you could no longer upgrade your pickaxe strength at that point, so having to hit everything 2-3 times instead of 1-2 from the previous areas (with proper upgrades) slowed down progress a lot. I sped ran to the bottom in about 6 in-game days and I think I saw everything there was. The main things I couldn't tell while playing was how much each item was worth, how much could I store/how much room did I have left, and a better indication of taking damage. Overall, good job with making an incremental game with a sense of progression that didn't feel too slow.

Putting Dig mouse click WITH direction is a seriously horrible flaw. Multiple times I would dig down because my cursor was just a pixel too low (despite holding Left/Right) and softlock myself. I wanted to really like this game but the ability to lose tons of progress because of a cursor slip is not forgivable. The art style is very good though.

Very addicting little game! Very fun, and I was not expecting to see that Final Boss, haha.

For future projects, when you're dealing with large numbers please include a thousands separator. It's hard to keep numbers like 10000000 and 100000000 apart at a glance.

The grind is real! 

The digging requires some planning so that you don't die midway or not be able to return, losing everything. Maybe if there was some way to make going back to base easier, the grind would be more tolerable.

I didn't finish. I almost ended water(?) area but then i died after digging for a while and quit. I think would be better to make swings faster but reduce the damage if you want to keep pacing. Wait each swing is boring. In Minecraft for example you hit relatively fast but your dmg is low. It more interesting then wait almost a second at the beginning. Signs also a nice touch.

I'm confused at how the "grinding" works. I got enough to fill the inventory, but even after digging down to the part where the water fills the room, I still didn't find anything I could do with the materials.