You are a dwarf, and you're digging a hole.

You have X minutes before the dragon arrives (I haven't decided yet).

Get to the treasure, and when the dragon arrives, it will get the gold, and you won't get eaten.

Prevent goblins from plugging your holes with sand by bashing them with your mithril shovel forged by ancient dwarven artificers.

I use Pico-8. Here's what works so far:

Ok, so enough of being cryptic.

This project is a bunch of firsts for me. First game jam, first game made for the pico-8, first program written in lua, first platformer I've ever tried to make. I also have a
small child and very limited time, so it's going to be a tough, but fun ride :)

Today I give you the goblin, let's call him Bob. Bob is pretty dumb, and for now all he does is walk back and forth, but he is controlled by the same forces as the dwarf - let's call him Ernest - so when Ernest digs a hole under Bob, Bob will fall and get stuck. Believe it or not, it feels like a huge achievement. Also, Ernest can swing his mithril shovel of doom, but for now he's super frustrated, as he can't hit Bob no matter how hard he tries.

I love programming the Pico-8. The limitations inspire my (limited) creativity and the platform abstracts out all boring chores, such as drawing things on the screen, but leaves you to do everything else on your own. And the things some people do with it... anyway, off to bed for today.

Very cool my man, first time im hearing about PICO-8 , it seems very nice and nostalgic, the game itself seems the same, would like to play that after release

Good Luck !

A lot of dark work today, but it paid off. I implemented my first ever finite state machine, and it's glorious. It made the code far less messy and adding behaviors is so much easier. So I fixed transitions between animations and Ernest now has multiple Bobs to deal with. I wasn't sure what feature to work on next - the goblins pouring sand over Ernest's holes, or Ernest bashing the goblins in the head. I decided the bashing was more important to get done first, because if I can't finish the rest in time, if you can kill the goblins and they can kill you, at least it's some kind of playable game. So next - add health for Ernest, allow goblins to strike back, then make them plug holes, and then - finally - the dragon.

I love it!!!  It's really cute!  I  can't wait to see the dragon!

This game aesthetic is soooo minimalist! Graphics, gameplay and everything! I LOVED! Really want to see this game finished.

Thanks! The plan is so far as follows: today goblins attacking the dwarf, and being able to lose the game. Tomorrow (and maybe today if I have the time) goblins plugging the dwarf's holes. This sounds gross, but you get my point. Saturday - the dragon. In the meantime, music (I've started on that yesterday) and polish. There's probably some joke here about polish and me being Polish, but right now I'm too tired to see it. Anyway, after the jam the roadmap will be: level progression, powerups, more enemy types and two-player coop. And probably lasers.

So now there is some kind of gameplay going on! Ernest can now get a good thrashing from the goblins, and I've added some FX to spice things up (camera shake and pause after hit). After you lose all health points, the game just restarts - for now. I have to add game states to the feature list - since the deadline is starting to rear its ugly head, it will probably be just some text to save time, but I really want to put together a fancy title screen - I think Ernest deserves it.

So Bob will now try to pour sand in the holes to undo Ernest's hard work. It's still buggy, and it's late, and I'm really tired, but I'm still one step closer to the MVP, and I believe that tomorrow I will be able to put it together more or less and make it submittable. 

Ok, here we go! Quincy the dragon arrives, and seeing no treasure , eats poor Ernest and it's game over!

Oh, an one more thing. The game is now live and submitted to the jam: https://matzieq.itch.io/super-dragon-digger-2d-with-lasers

[EDIT]: And the link to the submission :-D https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-3/rate/573698