Ludum Dare 57:
Marianas Miner
(
Play Game)
Controls:
* Arrow Keys / WASD: Move
* Space: Shoot Harpoon
* Escape: Pause
* To dig, press against the rock with the directional controls
* Navigate past the top of the map to win
* Extra life every 25,000 points
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This got off to a rough start. The theme was "Depths", which was one that I really didn't want to do. But after some brainstorming with my wife (who drew the amazing title card! <3), shower thoughts gave me inspiration. The phrase "you dug too deep" came into my head and it tied together a bunch of the ideas we had come up with.
And then once a day had passed out of the three-day time limit, I discovered that my "html52d" game engine that I built myself and have spent hundreds of hours improving and polishing... is now painfully flickery. I haven't changed the code, but something has changed -- maybe in Chrome, maybe in my computer hardware, maybe something else entirely... I already knew that it suffered from a little bit of flicker on iPhone but now it's affecting desktop. I tried to fix it but I couldn't figure out the problem. It's heartbreaking...
Given the deadline, I switched to Unity. But the Unity editor has gotten
very heavy since I last used it -- my laptop has 16GB of RAM, and Unity was using 17GB. It was making Slack completely unusable and Chrome and Discord were occasionally having internal crashes that forced me to reload pages/chats. And for whatever weird reason, it isn't consistently picking up changes to assets anymore so I had to get into the habit of manually telling it to reload. (And even then sometimes it would miss things...)
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But I'm happy with how it came together in the end!
What I came up with is inspired by Pac-Man and Dig Dug. It's fast-paced and shouldn't take particularly long to play. I tried to balance the gameplay to be accessible but challenging to try to make it fun.