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The Mining Game's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #27 | 2.878 | 3.375 |
| Visuals | #28 | 2.878 | 3.375 |
| How much do you enjoy the game overall? | #31 | 2.665 | 3.125 |
| Overall | #36 | 2.537 | 2.975 |
| How well does the game fit the themes? | #37 | 2.558 | 3.000 |
| Audio | #38 | 1.706 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How long was your dev time?
2:49:04
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Comments
Footage of me playing the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y76AszIxuEU
Seriously though, this was pretty well done. Like an idle game without the idling. Balancing felt pretty good (though lights felt a little expensive). Two minor complaints I have is that holding down the mouse button seemed a bit unnecessary (might just me playing on laptop, though) and that I didn’t ever feel like there were any stakes. Apart from that, a very solid entry!
It's incredible that this three hour game has procedural generation in it! I agree with the other comments, in particular the one about having an upgrade that increases the area you can mine, so I'll just say that I very much enjoyed my time with the game.
I almost completed it, but unfortunately came across a crash at the very end, and again about a minute into a new game I tried. I wonder if it has something to do with how quickly I was mining? I was holding down my mouse button and traveling in a straight line. Hope you're able to figure it out!
Thanks for the comment! This error was one I was aware of, but I didn't think there was enough time to debug and fix it. It has something to do with the collision, and how it checks if there is a tile in the way. If you wander outside of the generated game area (not very large due to generation times), it looks for a tile that doesn't exist hence giving the IndexError: list index out of range error. Will definitely be fixing this if I continue work on this game!
I agree with cul de grace, a bigger ramp up toward progression would have been nice. I will admit, I did not play through to the finish. A bit of music is always nice too, have a look around on itch. I usually spend about 10 minutes just finding a nice song to add to my games.
Well done on working in the theme, and the terrain generation
Because of how much I enjoyed your entry last week, I had to play yours for this week, too. Props to you for going for a more ambitious project. I think you did a great job distilling Minecraft's sense of discovery, improvement, and achievement into a mini project.
I would have liked to see an exponential curve for upgrades. My whole playthrough I had been looking forward to absolutely destroying a 5x5 grid of blocks with a single click, and having my sight range expanded to like 50-100 blocks wide. (But then again, speed might then become a limiting factor, so maybe the equipment upgrades would need to implicitly upgrade speed). This to me is a more fitting way to reward the player and wouldn't have taken too much more effort; even a single tier at the very end of absolute godlike abilities would've sufficed!
Regardless, procedural terrain generation is no small feat to pull off within the time frame, and I commend you for that. What was your algorithm for ore clusters (maybe a pre-defined set of shapes with a set frequency per ore)? I'm assuming the caves were cellular automata?
thank you for your kind words and advice! The generation was just different seeds of perlin noise to create ore clusters and caves, although a cellular automata approach would be interesting.
Ah, I see. I never would have guessed the project's ores and caves had used the same process. Cellular automata for terrain generation was all the rage back in the day when I first got into game dev; nowadays, though, the hot thing seems to be so-called "wave function collapse." Of course, the latter might not be entirely relevant for this situation, I just wanted to mention it while we were on the topic in general. Love this stuff!
I'm going to have to try something like that for one of my game jams soon! I love procedural generation, but it's so hard to implement in a game jam setting, so I was extremely impressed to see that.
Not sure how hard it is to implement perlin noise procedural generation in other engines, but Python made it very easy with the perlin_noise library. Definitely a cool feature to implement during a short time constraint!