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Archeological Emergency's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #201 | 3.412 | 3.412 |
| Theme | #300 | 3.441 | 3.441 |
| Audio | #443 | 3.118 | 3.118 |
| Overall | #564 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Graphics | #605 | 3.118 | 3.118 |
| Game Design | #775 | 2.676 | 2.676 |
| Fun | #957 | 2.235 | 2.235 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
In a few minutes of calm, before storm hits the dig site, your team scrambling to recover as many artifacts as possible before they are burried for ever.
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
All code is ours, most of icons/UI elements/Sounds are from various Humble Bundle GameDev bundles, all tiles are made by us. Logo is made specifically for this game by my friend and coworker Guyana
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Comments
Loved the vibes, and the music matching to the intensity of the upcoming storm. Kinda wished I could use all three of the tools at the same time or atleast had another way to prepare the next tile I wanted to dig up? Because it felt very slow, and for the last seconds you know it wouldn't matter even if you tried to dig or not. Another method could be balancing the waiting times to be way shorter, but making the artifacts still a little hard to find so the result would be similar (if 1-2 artifact found per playthrough is what you're going for). Other than that good job!! Fits the theme very well too in my opinion
Actually that is a great idea, shorter dig time, less artifacts more rock/bones which share visual clue with artifacts... Will consider that, thank you :)
This game has a great sense of atmosphere, the changing tempos of the background music do a great job of building tension as the storm approaches. I like the art direction as well it fits into the ancient explorer/artifact vibe nicely. I think this was a really solid idea for the theme, and it had some high stakes Indiana Jones feelings as a result. One place I think the game lacks is in the gameplay itself, the gameplay loop is solid, use different tools to discover artifacts and upgrade your tools to find better artifacts over time, thats a good start. But I feel that the actual gameplay of clicking a tile and then waiting for 30 seconds or a minute or whatever is very anti-climatic especially when you did such a good job of building the tension/atmosphere up to the point. I wish there was something else to do while waiting for one of my tools to work, and the long stretches of down time hurt my enjoyment of the gameplay. Overall, I think this is a solid entry with a real sense of identity and a unique take on the theme that would be even better with some juicer gameplay, good work!
Thank you... We will try to find something to keep player busy in a future :)
Very unique concept for the theme. I did find the gameplay a little slow and hard to understand. I think an indicator for which tools work best which tiles would help a lot with figuring out what to do. And maybe a screen that shows what to look out for in order to find artifacts would be helpful, it felt pretty random to me. Congrats on the submission!
There is a bit of info regarding what tool use for on the game pagew and if you try to dig with empty hand in game, but in most cases it is up to you. Pick is not very efficient digging dirt, it is for boulders and bones. Shovel - is fast but can damage artifact if it was in tile you dug up, brush is slovr but artifacts comeup in perfect condition.
Which tile contains artifact(or boulder/bone) is not random and can be figure out by visual cues.
We will try to make that clear in future releases... Somehow :D
Its a bit frustrating to dig 3-4 squares in a round and find nothing, decide it was bad luck and play again, and then find nothing again.
My first impression when opening the game was "holy what, they made a whole game wtf". I was impressed by menus, the amount of text, button images in-line with text and settings.
As others said, it feels like the game is promising, but there really is no reward at all in the beginning, nothing to grab attention or keep you playing. If that got added, the game would be 10 times better.
Luck is not involved in getting or not getting artifact, you are meant to follow visual clues to find where are artifacts spawned. Luck is only involved in artifact condition if dug up with shovel/pick and in what artifacts are on level. And just going out and saying - "hey, dig those specific squares" does not feel like a good game strategy. But I see where you are coming from and we definitely will figure out some ease-in strategy/tutorial section when will be working on full release.
We are a bit sad that people find it slow and hard... It was not our intention, but making it 10 times easier like one of commenters suggest is also not an option, there is no reward without challenge. If you can dig up 10-20 artifacts in perfect condition on your first run then you would just play through each level once and will be more or less done with a game. So it is a balancing act and we would have to zero on it at some point.
P.S., yep, we "made a whole game" :D We put a lot of time and effort in that game. So knowing that there is specific visual clue to tell you where to dig for artifact - please give it another go, it worth it.
Ok, I tried again and I have some more actual feedback now.. Its a bit embarrassing, but my dumb ass thought the bones was already discovered and I had to dig the dirt to find artifacts.
Slight spoiler ahead for anyone who hasn't played the game:
I started digging in the large chunks of bones and found 3 artifacts in one playthrough. None were in perfect condition tho, and I was hoping to actually progress. I also only earned 45 coins from that run, which isn't a whole lot if I need 900 extra coins for faster tools.
Thank you for giving it another go <3
To have "perfect" condition you have to use brush on trhose tiles, where artifacts are. As for money... Well, it depends. Condition do affect price, but also what you dig up. There are some common artifacts that worth 500 coins and some that are just 10-15(I guess you dug up some nails :D)
Anyway, thank you for playing our game and hope you will be back when we give it some good polish and balancing later :)
cool game, it takes some time to understand what's going on. A tutorial would help a lot
Agreed :)
This is a really fun take on the theme, I was really impressed with how fleshed out the game seems to be, with many screen for unlockable and different eras! I loved the music speeding up and changing in the last 40 seconds.
I think this game really needs a tutorial on what tools do what however. I first used the shovel and it was going to take 20 seconds, but then the pickaxe took more time than the total round? This seems like a pretty deep game and I would love to see it get expanded out with a proper tutorial!
Amazing job!
There is description of the tools on the game page and if you try to dig without selecting tool, for some reason we failed to realise that it would be useful to see it even if you selected tool :D
It would be sorted out in future :)
Great concept and execution!!
Would have loved to play more of it (played the full version you linked) but the game feels so slow and difficult to get in managed to get three artifacts.
A tutorial would have helped the game so much, coz I thought we had to use pickaxe on the bones and after some playthroughs figured out the white things are clues and not stones :D
Also noticed the music getting faster and faster which is a nice little touch but it gets irritating after the 15s mark. You could make a track keeping the time constraint in mind and edit it and then add it to the game maybe. You would have a lot more control over how it sounds.
Overall, a really good game and with enough polish and balancing I can see people investing hours in it..
Kudos!! :D
Thank you!
Yeah, we would definitely need tailor made soundtrack for that in a future, but for Jam we had to resort to just some track from assets we owned that sounded good-enough. It can't be just track made to speedup since each level has different duration, so we would have something looping and with playback speed increasing towards the end, but something that sounds better on different speeds is a must have.
Yeah looking forward to it.. Will be following your game so good luck!! :D
The game seems a bit difficult to understand, but it looks fun.
Thanks :)
That was pretty cool, gave me some 90's vibes kinda, a little reminiscent of things like AoE and such. Very cool, nice work!
That was pretty cool, gave me some 90's vibes kinda, a little reminiscent of things like AoE and such. Very cool, nice work!
A bit unexpected comparison with AoE, for that we are laching little guys running around with logs and pieces of meat :D But I am happy you liked it :) And we tried to make it look nice. Checkout version that was a bit out of Jam's time frame but we wanted to complete our original vision so we did as separate release: https://bswan2.itch.io/archeological-emergency-t12h-edition
Nice concept! Collecting the artifacts is fun, as well as eagerly hoping I'd chosen the right area to dig, haha. Also really enjoyed the tension created by the slowly approaching storm and the increasing tempo of the music. Great job :)
Yay, you noticed music becaming more tense :D I was worried no one noticed, since no one commented about it before you :)
Thank you!
Nice game, I love the fantasy of being an archeologist. The thing that kind of disappoints me is the game feels slow and not easy to start, I mean I just wanted to come and dig diamonds here, but then I have to wait every time I dig, and also figure out that the game time is paused or whatever so I can't dig... Especially for game jam game, I just wanna have fun as soon as I start the game, not have to wait or something. Now maybe it's a very cool game that develops over time, and maybe I should be more patient, but you're probably gonna lose some players like me. Overall, I really appreciate the mood and visuals, so not a bad game really, it's just a matter of preference :)
Oh, well, I guess we have alot of balancing ahead of us. But take a note that intended path is to use Shovel for first some rounds, before you are ready to buy upgraded tools and use better Brush. Maybe we shoud've start user with Shovel and Pick only, and let them buy Brush later... But it does not make too much sense narative wise.
And after all, haven't you enjoyed whole minute of calm before storm while things have been dug up? :D
Interesting and liked the historical aspect, nice job on this!
Thank you, we are planing to expand on historical aspect and have period accurate artifacts with custom art and descriptions for each :)
Hee-ho. Cool visual. Interesting idea
Thank you :) Glad you liked it :)
I would love to see more work and pollishing on this concept
Hah, we already have things in work, meanwhile you can check out T+12H version: https://bswan2.itch.io/archeological-emergency-t12h-edition it has all 12 levels we planned to do and some visual sugar for background :)
Nice game- I mainly like the idea. The other comments have great suggestions that I agree with.
Thank you :) We will expand on it
I really like these kinds of games and I think your team did well to put something like this together for such a short jam! I have a few game design feedback notes for if you do a post jam build. I think the player is rewarded by receiving artifacts and subsequently gold and upgrades. However I do not think the player rewards come soon enough in the game. I played three expeditions and did not have enough gold for one upgrade and I had only found three artifacts. This left me feeling like, as a player, I was not making any progress at all while playing and this was not satisfying or motivating. This could be solved, I believe, by making the first tier of upgrades cheaper! This will incentivize the player to play for longer. Also the fact you can only use one tool at a time made me feel like the gameplay was just me waiting for a certain amount of time while doing nothing. I think this could be solved by allowing the player to multitask (having multiple charges of tools that can all be used simultaneously) or my making the timers much shorter, like 600% faster (max wait time 5 seconds). I really am impressed by the UI and gameplay for such a short jam. I could totally see a game like this being expanded. Great Job!
Thank you for your praise and for your feedback. Actually intended progression is a bit different but we did not communicated it good enough, I guess :) What you meant to do is to use the Shovel for first runs. With its 20s dig time you would pull out 3x artifacts with slightly lowered gold reward due to not perfect artifact condition. And once you have enough gold - then you can upgrade your brush and focus on excavating perfcet ones.
But I do agree that there is something to think about in terms of time and progression speed
Unique story and game. Enjoyed digging around and finding artifacts! Your reply to previous comment helped me to understand how to play the game correctly. So thank you. Good work everyone ^^
Yeah, I realising now that in-game tutorial is somewhat lacking but hopefuly other people coming to see our game will see theese conversations first :) And we will work-in some better tutorial section in a future build of the game
At the beginning I thought that this game would be very difficult to play because of the large amount of time... but no, after buying the first tools the game became faster, and well, the idea of the game is very interesting :)
Yeah, we wanted it to be somewhat hard, and even with golden tier of the tools it woul be somewhat hard later on when you have access to deeper dig sites. You have to plow through top layers to get to the sweet-sweet old artifacts :) In full version of the game, with 12 eras, last level is 24 tiles deep and goes through 8 eras :) In this version, that fit deadline, 5th level is 9 tiles deep with 3 tiles per era
Awesome artwork on the page and game. It can be me being slow but didn't know how to play it aka I used the pickaxe and can't use any tools on anything else.
Hi! You can only dig one tile at a time, so you have to wait untill timer on dig area ends bbefore digging next tile. You can also cancel it and try another tile with another tool, since starting with a pickaxe is not a best idea. Have a look at the "operational manual" section of the page ;)