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A Short and Simple Puzzle Game

  • Dyluck
  • 04/18/2018 01:44 AM
  • 1197 views
This is a short puzzle game made within 48 hours for a game jam.

The objective of the game is to navigate your way through 20 levels, each of which may contain rocks, rocks with ore, roaming enemies, some spike traps, and a staircase which acts as the goal of each level. You have a pickaxe with 100 durability, which basically represents your life bar. Each level will have various paths blocked by rocks, and each rock will have a number which represents how much it will cost your pickaxe in order to remove the rock, and some of the rocks will contain Ore which you can use to repair pickaxe.

The challenge of the game is to find the most efficient way of clearing each level at minimal cost to your pickaxe, while avoiding traps and enemies that will kill you. Each time you take a step, all enemies on the level will take a step as well. Some enemies move in a set pattern, while some move randomly, so you need to plan your steps and move accordingly when it is safe. At the end of each level, you will have some options to fix your pickaxe using ore, read some flavor text, and Rest (sometimes forcibly) which will randomly result in either a positive or negative effect to you.

The game is pretty simple, but you do need to think and plan out your moves a bit. However, you cannot save in this game, so once you die you have to start all over from the beginning. It would have been nice to just restart the level, or have some kind of level select screen. Since the player and enemy moves at the same time, I assumed we couldn't move into the same square, but I thought I could move into a space with an enemy next to me since he would be moving away at the same turn, but I was wrong.

Overall, this was an enjoyable short puzzle game to pass some time with. The mechanics are pretty simple, but also quite well done for a game that was only made in 48 hours. It also has some fitting custom graphics and music which was very pleasant. I would say that this is a very decent puzzle game with fair challenge to spend an hour or so on.

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Posts

Pages: 1
JaimePazLopes
835
04/21/2018 11:33 AM
Thank you for the review. As it was a game jam, I was really short on time and could not make any kind of balance or polishment to improve the game difficulty. At first my plan was to make 2 game modes, one hardcore with only one life and another more casual that you could restart the level at will. This was my firts game jam, so I made many mistakes, the biggest one was that I want to make 20 levels. They get really hard at the end and become frustating to some people, I should have done 10 and focus more and the mechanics polishment, like fixing this death by going in a enemy square that you explained.
Pages: 1