I was one of the official judges this year, and now that the results have been made public, and I'm free to do so, here is my score and thoughts on this title:

Overall score: 8.5

Excellent game, and used a very unique mechanic. I hardly felt like I was playing an RM game! Loved the custom art assets, and the controls were smooth and responsive, something I find a rarity in ARPG RM games. My only real complaints are that I wish you could use a button to quick select skills on your hotbar instead of using the mouse wheel, and that I wish it incorporated the theme a bit more than a throw-away line in one of the endings.

I got assigned to judge this in round 2 of the contest. Sadly it was unplayable on my PC. I don't know why but I think you didn't test against non-QWERTY keyboards and non-standard mice. Not everyone has QWERTY and forcing to WASD means you got to contort the hands on those keyboards. Please make sure the arrow keys are an option in the future.

However the worst was the mouse. I could never do the left click on the crystal after selecting the one item. I dunno if it is because I use a trackball but the system never registered my left click as a left click. I tried all the others to be sure, but failed. In the end I had to mark this as I couldn't play it too far due to being forced in a configuration that just didn't work in the end and being unable to proceed past the opening puzzles.

Hopefully you can fix that for future games.

I had a lot of fun playing this and was incredibly impressed by the overall aesthetic of this game. I thought the dialogue was punchy, witty, and just overall well done. I definitely did a lot of wandering around, trying to figure out what to do, but even with that, I had fun. 

The opening commercial had me laughing and impressed by all the ASCII art! 

Great work with this!

So, from a technical, UI, user feedback and coding standpoint, this is nothing short of impressive. Namely that it was customized so heavily that this could be made in another engine and nobody would be the wiser. The game is focused on shooting and mining, aspects of combat is also done to spice up the mix. You are given stats to upgrade your parameters as you see fit. Once the tutorial is over, you get this massive sandbox of playground you get to play around in, as per the title says.

For what its worth, the overall game is impressive on all fronts and the story, while comedical in nature and a little simplistic with little depth to it, it works as a game of sorts. But let me just say this, this isn't my type of game. And after playing for a while I started to think it was a chore. Namely that this type of gameplay genre isn't something I particularly liked and thus my patience runs a lot thinner than genres I do like, so my impressions do not follow suit with others.

The other fact that you're given no end point (or proper quest direction) makes me feel like I'm just troggling along to the point where I stopped playing at the sandbox area. There is no emotional investment for me to patiently want to finish the game. Hence I had to put a halt to my progress. Stuff like not knowing the number hotkeys until I check the menu and stuff are all on my end, though it does hamper my enjoyment when there's no indicator of what to use. (In addition to all the whole shooting thing and managing skills and resource management.)

Do not take this as a negative, this is mostly me playing something that isn't for me. I respect the amount of effort done to this, no doubts about that. And considering your background, I don't doubt that its a massive highlight of your skills as a programmer (and artistry to some extent as well). Keep up the great work as always.

Really love the mechanics of mining materials and chucking them back at enemies!

As expected, an excellent display of coding prowess for this to be made in MZ. Would definitely love to see what this could have achieved with more hand-made maps as you have mentioned ;)

Nice!