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Drillshift's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Design | #5 | 3.810 | 3.810 |
| Overall | #13 | 3.488 | 3.488 |
| Enjoyment | #16 | 3.238 | 3.238 |
| Presentation | #17 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
| Metroidvania | #20 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
Team/Developer
Robonaut121 (Solo)
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Overall, not the kind of game I usually enjoy, but I had a lot of fun playing it. The fact that you made something so polished in just one week is frankly amazing.
- Thanks for pointing out the gaping hole in the tutorial. As soon as I came up with the tutorial room idea, I was so excited. All you had to do was hold J and D and it would literally play itself all while showing the player how to drill. Teaching the player downward-drilling was the intention of the room pictured here. Was that where you got stuck, or was there another way through or something? Could I have taught that part of the mechanic better?
- Sorry for the jarring ambience. It was kinda thrown together at the last minute, and it's literally just noise fading in and out on a loop. It was meant to sound like relaxing wind or something, but I evidently failed at that :-(
- I definitely would have added rooms where the camera scrolls if I had more time (and if I had this jam's feedback) to hopefully counter the blind gameplay issue.
Thanks for the constructive feedback!
"Gaping hole" is a bit strong. It basically worked, it just wasn't the smoothest learning curve.
Now that you've explained it, I totally get how this room was supposed to work. If I had actually held down J, it would have done a really good job. What actually happened when I played it was:
1) The first time I tried to drill, I must have been jumping. This caused me to shoot up into the ceiling and die.
2) Since I didn't want that to happen again, I made sure not to hold down the drill key, meaning I got stuck in the middle room. It wasn't until I worked out downward drilling that I was able to get past this room.
It's tricky to teach this mechanic without straight up telling the player what to do, but I think the game is better for it. Maybe if the ceiling on the left were really low, so the player could only enter the wall at ground level?
Btw, I feel like you're being a lot harder than yourself than you need to be. This is a genuinely good game, especially given your time constraints.
Thanks! Yeah, I should definitely lower the left ceiling...
Its a really great game for a solo dev in A WEEK???? 😳 man crazy
but for some reason i cant shake the feeling that i have played a similar game like this somewhere
Whew, I'm shaking. I found it frustrating and hard to control, even once I figured out the mechanic. At least I think I figured it out, I was unable to consistently drill upward, jumping and then drilling down seemed to work the most reliably. In the areas after you get the dash there's many places that require very precise timing. I wouldn't have even gotten as far as I did if the game hadn't taken pity on me and occasionally moved the checkpoint past spikes after I died just on the edge. That second room you showed here is where I gave up.
This is a cool idea, there's something really freeing about being able to tunnel straight through, it's almost like swimming, and well developed for a weeklong project. Thanks for submitting it!
Yeah, you're right about drilling upwards being an incredibly dumb timing. The reason I didn't make it easier during the jam is I didn't want drilling up out of the ground to be more viable then actual jumping, but in retrospect I should have given the player some sort of velocity boost when upward drilling. I think I was thinking something similar with the dash timings - that I didn't want them to be cheesable by normal drilling with some y-velocity-shenanigans, but I honestly feel like it was just because I was grinding out a Geometry Dash level with dumb dash timings at the time, and I felt the itch for more and more dash timings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Excellent game! The art, controls, level design, everything here works. The game is a little difficult at first but it's only during the time you're getting used to the mechanics. It's a good challenge!
This is a neat little game! I like the idea and the burrowing mechanic is well done. But the controls need some work. I could move and jump with the game pad, but it’s not fully supported. I think using a game pad would work better for a lot of players. Using the keyboard as is is just too difficult.
This game is also very hard and gets hard quickly. At least it did for me. And then there’s all the blind falls/deaths. At least the only penalty is that the game starts you over right away close to where last started making a burrow run.
(Sorry for taking so long to reply to this comment, I got a little distracted from this game jam)
I so should have done gamepad support. It would have literally taken five minutes, yet I didn't think of doing it :-(
Also, you're right - blind gameplay (especially in the industrial area) was something I didn't really consider was completely awful. I think my excuse in my head at the time was that it was "memory based" and the player would die there once or twice and then have it in their head what to do, but that probably wasn't the case for most people. It just added to the difficulty of an already incredibly unbalanced game.
Fun game with responsive controls, enjoyable, buy some rooms may be difficult to figure out
Just curious, but can you give any examples of rooms that were awkward to figure out for you? Rooms leading up to the first dash upgrade come to mind for me, but are there any others that you can think of?
Now that I think of it I only got stuck two rooms at the right of the one that has blue on the top, I couldnt anywhere from there.
In other rooms are just hard to perform the inputs correctly on time, they requiere precise timing but I dont think thats a bad thing, the game is very responsibe, so its more my fault
Thanks! Now I come to think of it, the second room you mentioned is particularly confusing to newcomers...
I've attached both room's intended routes if you or someone else got stuck there! (Arrows are dashes)
Really challenging yet fun game. I love the art style
I couldn't get a handle on the drill movement--it doesn't make any sense to me. Is it supposed to have a buoyant force that makes it rise? Because, I hate to break it to you, but that's not how drills work--
To be honest, the main inspiration was this game from Ludum Dare 48, so the mechanic isn't entirely original (or accurate lol), but I tried to build on it as well as I could.
I do like how smooth it is, and apparently a lot of people in the comments liked it (so maybe I'm alone lol), I just had a lot of trouble predicting where the drill was going to go, if that made sense. Smooth animations tho!
very fun, the main mechanics are very well done.
This game is super fun to play! It got me some time to get to the end because it gets really hard, but the mechanics are very satisfying, so I kept trying. The metroidvania element is certainly very present as well! Despite not having a map, I knew where I was almost all the time and I knew where to go next based on the clues left here and there.
Great job there!
This took me 4 hours... I want to scream.
good game
Sorry, I didn't intend to make it that hard :-/
Thanks though!
Dude this is a solid game for a jam. The drill mechanic is new and interesting and the art style is simple but still pleasant to look at, especially the leaves.
Thanks! I actually intended to have smoke in the background in the industrial area and fire in the depths instead of leaves, but I didn't get around to it.
Controls feel really nice. The drill mechanic is immensely fun to play with just on its own. It's a bummer that the difficulty of the screens either scaled way too fast for me or I was missing something. I would love to play a version of this with a lot more space to just enjoy the drill for a while before level 7 Celeste (which I haven't played yet, btw, so now I know I have no chance, haha)!
Ingenious concept, nice polish, too hard for my old reflexes xD
No, it wasn't just you - balancing has always been one of my weaknesses, and this jam was no exception. Sure, the first 3 rooms of actual platforming are easy enough, but I kind of got carried away after that. The last room in the game has such an absurd timing window that even after beating the game 5 or so times I can't help but die to at least 15 times, so maybe it's best you didn't get to the end :'-)
I mean, I did try to introduce concepts slowly, but then I thought "oh, wouldn't it be cool if the player went over there, then there", which followed by some skip-fixing, led to an incredibly unbalanced game. I'm sorry you had to be subject to my bad balancing :-/
(Celeste isn't nearly as badly balanced as my game, you should give it a try!)
That's why we practice with the jams! Keep honing the craft : )
And seriously, you have a fantastic mechanic in this game. I know there are gamer groups that have difficulty fetishes—you gotta put it in front of them and see how they do, haha!
Are you planning to continue work on it?
Sorry, wasn't really thinking about updating it. I might add a minor post-jam update with stuff I would like to have got done if I had the full 30 days, but apart from that I was planning to focus on a metroidvania that I've been working on in the background for the past few years, but really hasn't got anywhere at all. This jam has sort of helped in helping me see how much content I can produce in a few days, though, so hopefully (although I very much doubt it) I might have something to show for that project by the end if the summer.
Hi interesting game, first time i see drill mechanic in Metroidvania game.
You are pretty cool and you have make lot of polish.
I think to make it better add some train room to understand the different capacities.
Good Job.