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(+1)

This game is quite a surprise to me. Yes, it doesn’t have well matched graphics (although the hand drawn story screens are good). Yes, the controls are extremely quirky. Yes, the game mechanics of prophecies, money and profits is odd. But. There are the puzzles. This game has awesome idea of having player write their own procedural terrain/rock generator to satisfy needs of the miner driven by computer. This is the “inside out” ingredient used to its fullest. To me it was fun to come up with various math expressions and functions to cover required terrain types and allow for gold mining. The idea’s execution has some rough edges that should be polished.

First, I would consider changing the Structured Quarry Language (I love this name btw) to be as simple as possible to type; JSON has many quirks and unnecessary characters for this role. Also, I had no overview of available math functions (I only found out a few by trial and that logic operators are not supported). Neither there was any parentheses matching helper.

Second, I would consider completely changing the way the feedback looks - there are error messages shown, but not nicely; there are colored squares, but no hover tips on them.

And last thing, the tutorial could be interactive.

The other ideas of the game… I would consider throwing them out and rethinking them. I have played it as a puzzle, always hard difficulty, didn’t get to point of thinking about game economy etc. It seemed to be forcefully tacked on. I see the game as a very prototype of very interesting idea that should definitely be developed into some puzzle game / math education tool.

(+1)

Thank you for the excellent write-up. Here are my main ideas about the future of Prophicient:

  • main change: adding interactive tutorial scene with small step-by-step tasks
  • JSON is planned to be abandoned in favor of something better. Maybe taking inspiration from Minecraft WorldEdit’s syntax? As well as adding a proper list of functionality. Implementing standalone expression evaluator would also enable a web build.
  • hover tips for feedback were not added due to technical issues. This will be resolved. Also, there are further functional improvements planned for the UI, including resetting the level to see the constraints better.
  • game economy was introduced to better tie in the Ingredients. It is confusing and hard to design levels for. The current plan is to replace it with flat difficulty levels, with no money carried over between levels. Maybe something like Bad Piggies star system.
  • tune the miner AI a bit, and explain the miner’s actions better in game.
  • remake the graphics

All of this is also held back by all the technical debt accumulated in the project. E.g. there is no level editor, spaghetti code, etc. I will try my best to make this into a complete game.