itch.io

Yes, unfortunately I am not proficient with cutscenes. I hemmed and hawed about what exactly to do once the boss was defeated... In an ideal world with another two or three weeks to work on it, I'd want something more cinematic for the intro (where one might be able to see the planet from orbit, and see the spaceship from which the shop and your drilling vehicle are initially deployed), and a much higher-effort ending cutscene better explaining why what happens at the end actually happens, and a lingering end screen from which you could either "recover" and continue mining away in some New Game Plus or something, or restart or something

I was also unsure exactly how much health to give the worms, and I suspect I've drastically under-healthed the worm and the boss. Your drill does "mining_strength" in damage to worms and bosses every frame- 60 times per second- which ranges from 0.3 at the start to 12.5 at maximum upgrade level, meaning you can chew through... "750" health per second with a max drill, which... indeed... outstrips the worms and the boss by far (worms have 160 to 260 health, the boss has 200 health per heart) (though in my defense I only did this math now, and the intended combat method is bombs, which do 30 damage, and 2.5x aka 75 damage on worm's mouths and boss's hearts). My first change would probably be to, like, 6x worm and boss health (and also boost bomb damage by a similar amount (without boosting bomb damage to the player)) so drilling to attack isn't unusable, but takes significant investment instead of just being "oops I accidentally killed the worm in the way". I also wish I figured out what sort of death graphics to have for the worm, simply poofing really really sucks.

With that said, I'm glad the progression seemed well-paced, with the mushrooms and the worms and such. I spent a lot of time thinking carefully on when to introduce each new element. Mostly just wish I had more to introduce!! More enemies, more interactions, more special cases! Without such, the mid-late game kinda goes stale, effectively nothing new happens on the stretch from depth ~120 (where worms start showing up) all the way to depth 320 (where the boss lives). That's fine up to maybe half that distance, but by THAT point the game really wants another obstacle to show up. Issue is I dunno what to put down there!!

...Thank you for checking out my game!!!

You could probably chock up my frustration to my staunch refusal to play it as intended, instead playing as absolutely slowly as possible LMFAO

Compelling gameplay, overall I quite like it, but... frustrating... Specifically, my issues are:

1. The teammate abilities take waaay too long to recharge. The green teammate's ability to open and close doors is crucial for navigating the world, but they can only store two charges at once (busting through two rooms, or unlocking a door to double-check a sealed room's contents and then re-sealing it), and they take something like 30 seconds to recharge one charge at a time. My ability to clear the biomass is limited by my ability to open doors, until all of them are open.

2. On the other hand, the other abilities are sort of lackluster... The biomass scanner is vague. I understand what it does- it updates the "contamination status" of the room you're in, and the (up to) 8 adjacent rooms. Unfortunately, what actually makes a room "contaminated" is frustratingly unclear- it certainly isn't visible biomass presence, nor is it exactly "visible biomass in this room or any adjacent room" i.e. some safety margin. It is hard to tell what it is, which makes it effectively useless! The grenade, although it seems fun, isn't nearly as powerful as it could be, it isn't strong enough to make it usable in comparison to just rushing in and swinging the flamethrower around in a circle (which clears a larger-radius circle than the grenade) and, of course, that long recharge time...

3. Sometimes it appears as if biomass spawns out of nothing in a room I already cleared? You can mostly track the "source" of a wave of biomass if it hasn't already hit a wall, because it spreads outwards in all directions evenly, steadily. Sometimes when sweeping through rooms I haven't touched in a while (because I thoroughly cleaned them) I'll find what I call an "orphan source", which is a small- or medium-sized circular patch of biomass with a pod in the middle. If it were larger I'd be able to accept I'm perhaps sloppy and left a single pixel of biomass behind, but its size implies it's younger than the last time I was even in the room... Hence orphan source, spawned out of nothing.

4. The "escape" room is a real room with real biomass in it, but I can't touch it without ending the level!!! This means I can't actually sweep the entire level and clean out the entirety of the biomass, I can only keep that one room at bay, while emptying the rest of the level.

5. In a similar vein, a sealed door does NOT block biomass-spread, but DOES block my movement, which means, counterintuitively, that a sealed door is less certain to clean than an open doorway, as with an open doorway I can blast both sides with fire in rapid succession to confirm the biomass is dead on both sides, but a sealed door could be harboring biomass on either side, or in a nebulous middle region the camera's zooming between set target points does not allow you to ever permanently see (this is conjecture).

6. The guys! The guys!! They can't follow me!!! They get stuck on walls if I'm not paying enough attention! And then there is no sound alert while they're being hurt so I won't notice until they're dead... meaning I've lost one of my abilities! It's okay if it's the grenadier or the biomass scanner dude, but if door guy dies, the game actually becomes effectively unplayable (you cannot open doors)

7. The rescue operations, I'm confused on how they work. I've found one guy once before, but I couldn't figure out how to interact with him to make him follow me to the exit or something, and with the biomass encroaching on all sides, I didn't have time to thoroughly experiment. I didn't find anyone else (of the three I was supposed to find) so I assume they died to the biomass. I also returned to the room later and the guy I'd found was gone, and the marker at the top still reported 0/3 so I think he died too lol

To be clear, I really like this game. It's just that, when playing it, it FEELS like the feeling isn't mutual, if that makes sense. The game has a certain disdain for me.

If I had control of the game's development, the changes I'd make would be speeding up the recharge rates (maybe removing them entirely? They're limited enough by your ability to move between rooms, and the lives of your teammates), making the characters more cleverly pathfind the player when they're in different rooms (which is to say, move to an open door rather than trying to go directly towards the player i.e. running into a wall until you die), figuring out why biomass occasionally seems to spawn afresh from nowhere, making sealed doors prevent biomass growth between rooms (also preventing flamethrower fire from killing biomass THROUGH a door?), making the biomass scanner naively report binary whether/not there is biomass in the room (making it clearer what it does and more useful to the player), maybe adding new biomass formations that are more actively hostile to the player (something that shoots projectiles perhaps) to make it altogether harder to sweep a room completely clean.

Echidna Wars DX is available for purchase at DLSite: https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ187640.html (¥1540, roughly $9.67 at time of commenting)

I would recommend supporting the original creators, who are cool and deserve support for making a very cool game

Echidna Wars Mini, the original, is still technically available at D-Gate's site https://d-gate.sakura.ne.jp/mini_wars/game.html however, in order to access it through that URL, you'll have to jump through several hoops, including using an old version of java with worse security features and an old browser program that'll accept the very out-of-date java version.

It's heavily inspired by a flash game called "Motherload", actually!

Unfortunately the original game didn't see any work beyond what's been recreated here.

I still intend to expand it myself, it deserves more levels, but Echidna Wars Mini had been shelved in favor of releasing Echidna Wars DX.

By the time you're swallowed, it's too late to escape on your own- watch your health bar!! You can only fight to escape so long as you have some HP left. If it's fully depleted, you'll be swallowed. If you still want to escape, you have to switch to another character and rescue them by attacking the monster

Unfortunately, Usaco is nowhere to be found in the assets, so I cannot add the funny bunny lady as a selectable character (and she's not in the original version so she wouldn't show up in the authentic original ver. anyways)

But yes! I want Usaco to fill the fourth slot on the character select screen, and leave the lower four for popular (in the genre) characters, like Luka (and maybe leaving one or two open for mods in the future. Would love to make characters really easy to mod in as an outsider unfamiliar with my code)

I just need an artist who can replicate the style of EWM...

The implementation isn't fully accurate, but yes the original has two healthbars over an enemy, one for the enemy and another for the hapless victim

The math is helped by the fact that at an extremely local scale, as you zoom in closer, hyperbolic space behaves just like regular space, so reflections and rotations and stuff work exactly the same. I essentially use regular physics simulation for collisions that, at the instant of impact, consider things to be in euclidean space to do the maths, then just continue moving things with complex hyper-math until another collision.

However, the speed of the ball is tied to the difficulty, and I wouldn't want to involve the player's velocity else the ball's velocity would be affected, wonking up the difficulty.

...Maybe I should have had the player intangible while moving regularly too? But yeah, being intangible is quite useful for keeping things simpler for longer, which goes against the intention to have you engage with the hyperbolic space.

Excellent atmosphere here!

Just wish I could swap between scanning and controlling one specific drone, if it's not out of fuel I'm not done using it yet!! Also would want to refuel drones by bringing them back to the listening post, but that's perhaps not feasible in-universe.

And I agree, there are lots of avenues you could take this if you wanted to, to make it a larger, longer, more intricate game.

okay WHAT

HOW did I miss this??

This is the original real asset, as in worked on by D-Gate (or Asimofu? I don't know their respective roles in Echidna Wars Mini development)

There's just this extra sachiho hurt sprite my formatted spritesheet does not have. How? Why?

...Fix will be bundled with various other changes I have made, and pushed all together as V1.4 (It includes reformatted level data, and accompanying rendering and collision changes to handle the new levels as text files, as generated by the level editor I have been working on in the mean time.)

I think I have found the issue... It seems that Sachiho... doesn't have the sprite used for that animation, and I somehow just never noticed?

Notice near the bottom that Sachiho is missing a sprite that Miria has. I suspect finding (or making?) one to fill that spot would fix this issue.

"... was this ... ?"
"it was" is the grammatically-correct way to answer your question affirmatively. Could sound suggestive (like perhaps they on-boarded new developers, or died), but it's just politeness

last update here may be 2 years ago, but last update on Patreon is April 1st 2026, which COULD be a joke but I doubt it

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer." just randomly while you're playing. Don't get cocky!

我正在使用翻譯服務——如有任何誤解，敬請諒解…

不，我不能。

{:mode=>:locked}

MY GOD

Okay so the issue is the empty party member slot (not party member 1 or 2, but 3), it's occupied by a dummy character whose only attribute is they're still locked and unusable. So probably the easiest way to fix this is to skip healing party members who are locked lol

For a look into the debugging process, the important text here is

The method named :* with args [10] doesn't exist on [NilClass, NilClassFalseClass].

(The keywords being the method name, its args, and what it's supposed to exist on. So here, I'm apparently multiplying nil by 10 for some reason.)

And even more important, the "backtrace" pointing at line 201 in the "enemies.rb" file, which is

char.health = 40 + char.hp_level * 10

Which implies that when the game checks "char.hp_level", it gets back "nil", meaning mostly likely this isn't getting set. This is weird because all the characters are supposed to have an HP level, it should be 0, 1, 2, or 3 (meaning they have collected 0, 1, 2, or 3 HP upgrades, which means their max health is 40, 50, 60, or 70)

So the solution is some rigorous debugging to figure out exactly why the hp level seems to be missing

Primarily "no" because no such android version originally existed- this is a simulation of a software that existed in the past and is difficult to access now. An android port is far outside the scope of this particular page.

In the future, I plan on expanding upon the foundation here, but until multiple prerequisites are established (like a working level editor for one) I cannot in good conscience work significantly on this project- after all, it's basically 100% there.

Is it possible that one of the characters in your party (that isn't the active party member) got hurt before picking up the food item? The menu opens to show them healing up, and I recently got a crash related to some timing nonsense with that. If your issue is the same, I could actually push out the bugfix this moment! (Otherwise I'll have to research more to find what's wrong)

As in, access to the original Java program?

If you check the Project EverDriven discord (mod community for Echidna Wars DX) I got a little help from the community there. In short, install an old browser (Pale Moon), refuse to update Java to the latest version, add "https://d-gate.sakura.ne.jp/mini_wars/game.html" to Java's whitelist so that it'll run anyways, and visit said URL. Give it a minute, and the game should come alive after a heck of a lot of loading.

This page should help with the process, too.

The fix is implemented. (Had more time before a certain commitment today than I thought.)

Give it a try now!

Oh, I see! In effect, this error is saying "an entity is being assigned an animation state they don't have", so I am 99% sure what's happening- the level-end crystal is being given something incorrect and causing the issue. Then, when closing the console, the game continues as normal, having skipped the "load crystal" routine, so you enter the empty area where there should be a crystal, but it's missing. Since level completion is tied to destroying that crystal instead of any loading zone, this means the levels are unbeatable right now... whoops!!!

I will have this fixed by the end of the day tomorrow- gimme like 24 hours

Ahh, that's DragonRuby's console. It sounds like something broke and it's trying to tell you what's wrong. Could you share the entire contents of the console screen? It should include an error message which would help me fix whatever broke.

Or, you accidentally hit one of the keys that opens the console...? Try hitting the `/~ key to close it.

But otherwise, thanks for checking out my videogame!!

As a reminder, consider all links in the comments to be scams. If I WERE making an update to this game which required a new itch.io page, I'd put it in the description, not a comment, because I have access to the page description lol

(And I AM working on another update to this, which should bring it significantly further in line with the original project)

Now that is some funny etymology

This post is in celebration of 1,000 Windows executable downloads (we're at 2.2k total downloads so I missed important milestones there)

My previous projects had gotten a couple hundred interactions at best before, this level of sustained attention is new to me lmao

"Echidna Wars DX" is still purchaseable from D-Gate's DLSite page, right here for less than $10 (although the price fluctuates with the exchange rate between USD and Japanese Yen)

"Echidna Wars Mini" is technically still accessible at this website, but you need to use an old third-party website and tell Java not to care about security in order to get it running, which is altogether too many obstacles for me to be happy with, which is why I made this project (and continue to perfect it).

If you're looking to mod Echidna Wars DX, you will want to obtain a copy legitimately first, and then visit the EverDriven discord server, where EverDriven is an overhaul mod for Echidna Wars DX, and the members there can help you mod your game.

Re: Point 2, enemies healing very quickly. I checked the code, they SHOULD (excluding unforeseen consequences) heal 1 hitpoint every 32-60 frames (depending on their eating animation lengths, a shorter animation means quicker healing), WHICH IS once to twice per second (it's the worm that heals every 32 frames, and I could probably artificially slow that animation down to take 48 frames instead...?)

Is it ACTUALLY true that enemies take half damage once they have captured a player character? It really limits your DPS- if it's not true, that'd get you double the friend-saving DPS and make Mirea plenty effective at saving characters.

1. Oh, this is helpful! I haven't been able to find anything on the level 2 attack, just 1 and 3. I'll get right on that.

2. They might be recovering every frame, instead of every animation + sound cycle, and they might be recovering way too much. What I know is that some (slime and jellyfish) are meant to spit out their capture after dropping below half health, which I don't remember whether I properly implemented. They DO take half damage from attacks while capturing, I did implement that though. I'll double check video evidence and compare notes again.

3. I originally had it exactly like this (press the button X times in Y seconds to escape) then I carefully read the user manual which said something about a gacha-type system for escape (which sounded like spend X health for a Y% chance to escape). I think both have their merits, and I could definitely add it to the list of things to include in an options menu once I know how that should look like.

4. See, I knew SOMETHING was going on with the inconsistent, infrequent item drops. I did a whole statistical analysis across multiple videos, tracking which rooms exhibited which enemies of which types dropping what at which frequencies. I believe I settled on a per-enemy sorta.... "juiciness" metric, which determines which item pool to select from. Enemies are either "regular" (25% chance to drop rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat), "ricey" (50% chance to drop rice), "meaty" (50% chance to drop meat), or "upgradey" (25% chance for rice, 12.5% chance to drop meat, ~3.9% to drop a pow-up, ~3.9% to drop a health-up [3/4 × 5/6 × 1/16). If you had more concrete stats, or could tell me otherwise why the slimes at the end of level 1-2 seemed to drop a meat when that's outside the expected range, or why the spawned slimes from le pipes ALWAYS dropped ONLY rice, that'd be awesome and amazing, stats are really tough to glean from limited video evidence.

And thank you for being so thorough with your feedback

Echidna Wars DX is a paid game, purchases of which support the original developers (which I encourage). I don't believe any ports to an HTML format exist for it? And I would highly recommend anyone wanting that, or wanting to MAKE that, to simply direct their attention to the official source of Echidna Wars DX.

If Asimofu and D-Gate go defunct and it becomes impossible to acquire legitimately from the dlsite, then I would consider it free game (pun not intended) and no longer piracy. Until then, though, please support the original creators by buying and playing their game!

Thanks for the feedback!

1. I've been desperate to figure out how Mirea's flight worked, because indefinite flying does feel broken, but I had no way to verify if any instance of a video showing the player no longer flying was due to a time limit being exceeded, or due to the player simply deciding not to fly any more. His is invaluable information.

2. That's interesting to hear! More guesswork on my part, this time due to the sprites- there's no flying + shooting sprite so I had assumed it was not an ability (while playtesting, I, too, find myself wanting to shoot while flying. This should be a really easy fix, simply removing the "&& not flying" from the prerequisites to shooting as Mirea. [Maybe also confirming it looks correct.])

3. (& 4.) This one will be tougher to properly implement, but sounds correct. Levels should keep track of which pre-generated items in each room have been collected, including Pukis.  Actually, if they always respawn (minus the Pukis) on level reload, that makes it easier, as I don't have to carry over knowledge of which items were collected indefinitely, and can naively reload the level from static data on level start (minus, of course, pukis, which are already tracked indefinitely, in your save file.)

5. Good to know. As they are now, they ONLY lose all HP, and keep their health/weapons upgrades. There is a central "kill character" code block that I can pretty simply add "also set the levels back to 0" to. This also implies, level-design-wise, the developer should be fairly benevolent with level ups.

6. Woah that's not good!! I'm not sure why that's happening (i.e. this will take a while to figure out...), I'll have to investigate this more closely.

7. I'll revisit the enemy behavior code, as capture and digestion SHOULD preoccupied the enemies, with the exception of the lamia, who moves around (and possibly attacks w/o capture ability) while digesting. Possibly my janky-ass target-priority code needs to be rewritten.

8. (& 9.) Sachiho's room is incomplete, yeah... What one might also note is level 3 ends "late", with the player jumping up to end the level instead of there being a hitbox in the final room, on that final platform, to end the level. I haven't implemented a "level-end trigger" hitbox type, they've all been screen transitions sorta hijacked for multiple purposes. The puki, delta, cat, AND flowing curtain are in-game, I just have no appropriate protocol for an animated background (or foreground) element and never picked a best way to implement such.

10. I'll be honest. It wasn't very fun to work on, was a pain to test, and a personal deadline was rapidly approaching, so I did what I could and called it good enough. I really should get on top of PROPERLY implementing ALL of the "help!" icon because it does look really nice in the videos and will look nice once implemented.

11. I am fairly sure I implemented the worm's vacuum ability after the initial release, so if you downloaded the game near its release and are relaying feedback only now, download the updated version! It has the worm suckies

12. GOD YEAH THE JELLYFISH IS WEIRD! I took a stab in the dark implementing its movement and I'm still not happy with it (it goes crazy when capturing someone because it stops bouncing up but its gravity doesn't stop pulling it down.) I should analyze video more thoroughly to figure out how it ACTUALLY behaves when moving up towards a player character, and when moving down towards a player character, with those edge cases I can safely interpolate behavior between the extremes.

Re: moving & attacking, there is a one-or-two-frame delay between first holding the jump button, and a jump actually resulting, this is when the "bending knees to jump" sprite is displayed, but it also makes jumps feel a little stilted as you have to plan ahead, not just react to enemies. The moving and jumping actions themselves are based on frame counting on blurry videos with no actual input displays, so they LOOK right to an outsider, but may not feel quite right, and might not be accurate pixel values. I suspect running might be half a pixel per frame too fast...? And jumping is equally likely not right- tuned to just about the correct height of a jump as per the video evidence, but gravity's strength is a big assumption (it might not be constant through a jump, like gravity being stronger while you're falling, or there being a terminal velocity we might reach while falling, etc) and so it may feel wrong.

(Also, sorry for springing this much text on you, I just really appreciate this game for its specifics and want to address feedback adequately.)

Yes, I believe I did look at the aryion thread about it, it at least looks familiar. I tried downgrading firefox to make it run locally, I might be stoopid but I couldn't get it to work, which spurred on the project.

I have the tools to simulate, but not to emulate, the original game. I don't know where to start with regards to building a virtual machine, it's simply outside my tool- and knowledge-set.

I'll look into the discord server, but no promises! (I am reclusive.) Fine-tuning the physics or interactions would make me quite happy, and the denizens' knowledge about the game would be quite useful for that purpose.

I would love to pick this back up, it's been a hot second since I last touched it, and I've had a couple ideas for unofficial expansions that I really need to get to.

As a general PSA, don't click links in comments. I am not sure why (and it's not just on my page), there appears to be a plague of bot posts advertising a large number of free adult games on the other side of a link. Undoubtedly this is a scam of one kind or another. Practice safe internet browsing, everyone!

Yes, the original game was only 3 stages. There are a bunch of totally-unused assets too, which points to the likelihood that it was unfinished when Echidna Wars DX came out, and it [Echidna Wars Mini] was shelved. I cannot replicate what wasn't there :P

This was made in Dragonruby! So, written in ruby!

Ahh, I should fix those. I can guess what's going on with the healing thing, and the names being the same SHOULD just be some functionality being commented out for testing purposes.

I plan on updating it eventually, to increase its parity with the original demo, but it won't get any "new content" updates until after reaching perfect parity.

As well, such "new content" updates would be quite slow. It's a lot easier to piece together pre-existing assets to conform with pre-existing specification, than it is to make entirely new assets and entirely new levels.

I'm surprised! There's nothing about the way I handle projectiles that should be even a little unstable.

This game engine struggles with HTML builds for reasons outside the developer's control (even an empty project, doing nothing, can't reach a stable 60fps...) so I highly recommend- if you like the gameplay, but feel like it's too slow, download it and run locally! It'll be so much better running at a smooth 60fps.

(and I'll take a look to see if I can replicate the crash)

Echidna Wars DX is available from D-Gate here