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Pocket DrillPunk's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #18 | 4.441 | 4.441 |
| Overall | #23 | 4.257 | 4.257 |
| Gameplay | #25 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Audio | #39 | 3.971 | 3.971 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #104 | 4.559 | 4.559 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Just me! (it was a fun experience!)
Was the resolution a challenge?
Yes! But at the same time it was kinda inspiring. Limiting myself to 64x64 pixels made me focus on other things such as animations, palette, etc. One of my biggest issues was fitting text on the screen, I kept that to a mininum.
What did you learn?
I learned a lot about pixel art! I also had a lot of fun mixing different game genres, it can definitely be challenging at times.
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Comments
Love the tile art. Nice work!
Really great game here. Took a second for me to figure out the use of resources in the turn-based combat but then I really appreciated the game loop of drilling around for resources to use in battle. Not to say that I was any good at it. The animations and sound design were excellent as well. Great job.
Congratulations on making this game !
I've played your game during a live that you can watch here :
The live is timestamped so you can go directly to your game.
I hope the feedback and live reactions will be useful. Keep it up !
(don't hesitate to follow me on itch, twitter and youtube if you wanna help!)
I really like the concept, the turn based battles matched with the digging. Very good job on this one!
There's a LOT packed into this jam entry, you should feel proud! I played on normal difficulty and I did feel like I ran into some bugs (all the boss did was defend), but it was a fun experience overall!
You picked a tough genre to balance and mixed in procedural generation to boot; I think the biggest issue is somewhere at the intersection of these. E.g. how rare a particular material is vs what kind of skills it gives me access to vs the return on investment on the cost to use those skills in battle. Because of these imbalances I was gravitating to only 2 or 3 of the many available skills to get the most bang for my buck, and likely missed a bunch of cool stuff.
I liked the graphics in general, and the VFX in particular.
Impressive effort for a solo project! Keep it up :)
Great game and I had a lot of fun with it! Would like to see the battles get fleshed out more to make them more interesting/strategic since blocking felt like it wasn't very useful. I do like that you need to be prepared before every battle and so you have to be careful with mining rather then mindlessly keep going. Looking forward to seeing if there will be more!
I had fun playing it, it reminds be of an old shock shockwave game called Motherload (I think). You managed to cramp a lot into such a tiny space! And the graphics are very impressive, especially since you worked on it by yourself!
Fantastic - love the combination of resource hunting and RPG style combat - makes for a really strong gameplay loop. Everything is just so juicy too, from the battle transitions, to attack animations and especially the level generation loading screen there's just so much life to everything. Special mention for the way the UI elements enter and exit, which really stood out as just feeling great :)
The pixel art is great, especially the sprites (my favourite being the carvina enemy) and the UI, which is very readable but still with a lot of character to it. Really good font, too :)
The music is great, with a nice contrast between the intensity of the battle theme and the more ominous exploration music, both of which add a lot of atmosphere
From reading your other comments here some of the cut features sound great - things like the radar to seek out particular elements combined with elemental enemies would add a lot to the game, and I love the idea of powers scaling depending on what resources you have to hand to encourage being careful about what you spend. Would love to some of these if you were to publish a post jam update :)
Really unique and interesting game i kinda wish i got more into it but killing monster for exp is kind of repetitive, for the drilling part i wish there where no empty space so that you felt more like you where doing a hole wich is really satisfying and i dont really understand what is the incentive to use the other atacks when you upgrade the drill it fels like you should just drill for rocks and spam the drill and super drill (i dont remeber the exact name).
I feel like im bashing the game too much but i really like the idea, the amount of content you were able to put in the game is impressive and the art is great so i really wanted to like this game.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! And don't worry, you're not bashing the game haha, I completely understand your points and there are currently some balancing issues with the game. Some features didn't make the cut and I tried making as many abilities as I could but I was quickly running out of time. So the drill ended up being overpowered, despite having a higher cost for etherdrill.
There are other ways to play, but they're not nearly as effective as just drilling dirt away. Struggle scales with Max HP, and Frost Fuel scales with Jets Fuel. Sparkles scales with everything, so it's the best move for a "balanced" playstyle. But currently there are no incentives to gather more jet fuel. The idea of having empty spaces has to do with this. I wanted to make the cave itself look like a dungeon, not just a "gathering bonanza". When I say I cut some things, I actually mean a LOT of things. I wanted to make a "radar" kinda thing so you could scout for resources, I wanted to make them more relevant at higher levels, and I wanted to make badges to "modify" powers based on elements (more fire pwr, more bio pwr, and so on), and I wanted to make it so certain enemies took more damage from certain elements. But well, maybe I get to do that after the jam rating period!
Anyway, thanks again! The feedback means a lot.
So much to like about this game. It feels a little overwhelming at first with so much info crammed into the tiny canvas. I really like the mining + rpg elements very cool combination. Visually the game looks great, lots of juice and flare, but also feels a bit muddy and noisy. I really think it would have helped to at least have a brighter/more colorful drill to help stand out from the environment.
I couldn't help myself sorry lol
Anyway, great job overall!
Thanks for playing!
I was thinking maybe a CRT screen filter would've helped, I'll try it after the jam rating period. I like the idea to have the drill stand out from the environment, I'll play around that idea as well. Thanks again!
Very fun and appealing game. I really like the RPG elements and how they tie in with the digging/exploration elements, it was fun to prep for battles by collecting resources. I also thought the animations were very smooth, though the UI felt a little cluttered at the beginning.
I think my one proper gripe is that the game always seemed to say I was level 1, even when I levelled up? Maybe I was just mis-reading something though.
Thanks a lot!
The UI during battle has a bug, it always says level 1, but that was an oversight of mine (forgot to include the updater component to this specific UI counter). When I noticed it, it was already past submission time.
The sprites have an incredible feeling and pull off a certain vibe I can't quite capture with words, a vibe that is strongly helped by the music choice in battles and on the field. I'm especially enamored with the drill machine's turn animation. All the visual effects are incredibly pleasing too, especially considering the small resolution the game is working with. The basic loop of collecting resources to battle enemies to level up your stats and continue the whole cycle just a bit better is a fun one, but I can't help but feel like the only one that matters in the end is more dirt to fuel your increasingly efficient and powerful drill, as all other options are left behind in terms of raw damage (and given the lack of status effects, this is the only thing that matters). This isn't helped by the strict resource caps on everything but dirt, including a miniscule maximum of 10 for the green. I only played the shortest cavern, but I wish there were enemies with red outlines in that stage besides Carvina (as delightful as Carvina is).
Thank you so much for playing and the thorough feedback! I appreciate it!
One thing to note, green doesn't have a cap of ten, it's just that the maximum digits are 2 for the UI counter, so it seems like it's capped, especially on the easy level which is filled with bio tiles. The cap was supposed to be 99, it's currently uncapped.
Regarding balancing and content, you're spot on. Currently increasing the drill power and gathering a lot of dirt is the easiest way to deal with most bosses. The exception is the one in the hard level, which requires you to shield properly because it lashes out a lot of damage.
The reason for that was time, of all things haha. I realized I had to wrap up the game and iron out the kinks, so after I made etherdrill, sacriguard (useless) and sparklers (strongest if you don't focus on one particular stat), I was running out of time and still had to fix some things. I had two plans: one was to make stronger versions of elemental attacks that used less dirt, and the other was to put elements on enemies so attacks would be less effective or super effective on them. I had to cut that to deliver the game on time. But maybe I'll keep working on it and make a post jam version.
Really good. I spent way longer playing that than I had intended. I feel like, if this was expanded into a broader game, I could lose an awful lot of time to it. Graphics and music hit the spot too. Great stuff.
Absolutely amazing, how did you even come up with this idea?
Visuals- 10/10
Everything else- 10/10
I had a lot of fun.
Thanks, I'm super glad you liked it!
I was worried with mixing those genres at first but as I developed the game it grew on me haha.
Wow, this is really impressive. The sheer amount of content (both graphical and gameplay-wise), and the fact it all fits so beautifully in 64x64 is amazing. I liked that leveling up helped you both in-battle and while mining (it makes you feel the upgrades that much more), and I think the core gameplay loop is rock-solid (pun intended). I think there's a lot of room to continue developing a game like this, if you decide to!
Thanks, I'm so glad to hear that! This jam game is one that I want to work more on, it was so fun to make, despite the huge amount of work haha.
I love the art and assets. Perfect gameplay and solid candidate to win the jam.
Amazing work!
Thank you for the kind words!
The graphics and the UI is simply amazing, it gives a lot of information on a very tiny screen, the audio is very nice and sounds custom made, not a fan of turn based combat but gotta respect the effort and love put into this game
Very original game, I laughed a lot in seeing a drill in a turn-based battle like an old final fantasy. Fun experience, really great job doing it solo.
Can I ask you how many hours a day did you work on it?
Sure!
I'm currently kinda on a sabbatical of sorts, so I won't go back to my "official" job (I'm a software engineer) until next year. So I have a lot of time in my hands, and I've been using a ton of it on honing my game dev skills.
On this game, I worked about 8-9 hours a day give or take, I missed a couple of days but on the last day I worked like 15h.
Very good game! Gameplay is very good, I like that showing the enemy next move makes it very interesting to plan ahead and use resources more efficiently. Art and music are very well made. An overall very polished experience!
Maybe there could be some power-ups while gathering resources like increasing drilling or infinite jet fuel for a short time to make the gathering more fun.
Well done!
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!
Power-ups while gathering resources is a very neat idea. During development I thought of implementing buried "badges" that would change some aspects of your gathering/combat, such as doubling your fire damage and increasing speed. I ended up having no time to implement it though, haha.
Yeah I understand, but hey if you get to update it I will wanna play it again!
I remember seeing this game in the discord! I absolutely LOVE the animations and graphics! Everything feels so polished and super professional. The game idea is also very interesting, having to gather resources in order to attack and level up. I will try to beat it!