LudumData

Gold Digger by SpaceMonkey

[raw]
made by SpaceMonkey for LD 43 (JAM)

2018-12-04<em>03h48</em>28.png

Sacrifices are not always the ones we expect.

What should you sacrifice? Gold? Your Uncle's respect? Your workers well being? The choice is yours!

GOAL

Maximize your final score!

Genre: Strategy / Idle game / Clicker

Controls: Mouse Only

Setting : Uncle John has a mining company. It’s still at the start of the business, but everything seems to be going well. He has three happy employees and has $30 in reserves. After one year of hard work, that means he is looking forward to go on a holiday. Because he has trust in you and seeks a potential successor in the family, he would like you to keep an eye on the business while he is on a trip to the nicest beaches in Jamaica. During this period of two weeks, he has given you all the rights to do anything you can to keep the company running.

Shop : - Pickaxe - Improves working speed. Equipping your workers with the proper tools is extremely important for their efficiency and self-esteem. - Helmet - Mandatory protection equipment for diggers. - Coffee - Improves working efficiency, but your workers will start taking breaks when they feel like it. - Stimpack - Dramatically improves working efficiency. Drugs are bad.

Workers : - Red Worker - Costs 2 coins at the end of the day, 4 when you hire him. Severely underpaying people is very bad. - Orange Worker - Costs 5 coins at the end of the day, 10 when you hire him. Underpaying people is bad. - Blue Worker - Costs 10 coins at the end of the day, 20 when you hire him. - Green Worker - Costs 20 coins at the end of the day, 40 when you hire him.

I will implement a leaderboard in a post-jam version, but in the meantime you can post your score in the comments if you want to share it.

Windows https://spacemonkeyc.itch.io/gold-digger
HTML5 (web) https://spacemonkeyc.itch.io/gold-digger
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/gold-digger

Ratings

Overall 489th 3.457⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 282th 3.565⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 463th 3.217⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 711th 3.174⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 841th 2.783⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Audio 397th 3.261⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 440th 3⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 665th 3.13⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 18🗳️ 19🗨️

Feedback

Disto
04. Dec 2018 · 02:34 UTC
My first score ![GoldDigger_Vini.png](///raw/076/f1/z/1e35b.png)
Joseph Manley
04. Dec 2018 · 05:42 UTC
I genuinely got into to this. Good job. :thumbsup: I suggest removing the bilinear scaling though. It will make your spritework less blurry.
🎤 SpaceMonkey
04. Dec 2018 · 05:59 UTC
Thanks for the feedback and for the tip! I'll make sure to try it. I'm really glad to know you got into it ;-) We tried to make the game as fun as possible.
JohnnyGinard
04. Dec 2018 · 17:48 UTC
Very cool idea! Good job! :smile: :top:
Suliac
04. Dec 2018 · 21:24 UTC
Simple but efficient, Great job ! :slight_smile:
sadzanenyama
04. Dec 2018 · 21:25 UTC
I couldn't really buy much after day 3. I kinda just spammed out workers making me just sit for the last few days. The font for money and workers all kind of blurry and hard to see. Solid entry
Luca1152
04. Dec 2018 · 21:30 UTC
Pretty cool game :). My total was ... well, about -20k if I recall correctly, but maybe the problem was that I hired too many red ones :))
Abso
04. Dec 2018 · 21:33 UTC
Loved the game and played it all the way to day 10 <3, so fun and addictive i just loved making money and hiring workers. Only issue is that gaining money was a bit tooo easy. Honestly though make a full version of this please i would love to help make the graphics for the game too
Eddie Li
04. Dec 2018 · 21:37 UTC
Good job overall. Some minor issues that I experienced like money becoming negative? But besides that it was quite nice.
🎤 SpaceMonkey
05. Dec 2018 · 22:52 UTC
@luca1152 Sorry for not including proper instructions in the game! I now updated this page with more information so the game can be more enjoyable for everyone :thumbsup: Thanks for playing <3
🎤 SpaceMonkey
05. Dec 2018 · 22:54 UTC
@eddie-li Thank you so much for playing! It is actually a design choice to allow for the money to be above zero, it would feel like cheating if you didn't have to pay for those workers ;-) you can think of it as a loan?
🎤 SpaceMonkey
05. Dec 2018 · 22:58 UTC
@abso Best comment :100:

If you are serious about that art you can contact me on twitter or Discord :v: (see my profile)

Ho and earning money is easy, but scoring is much much harder haha
Spaceface14Dev
06. Dec 2018 · 00:12 UTC
Great game! The game was simple, hence easy to understand, and was honestly quite addicting. I would love to see more, maybe a bit more time put into art and so more mechanical impact on being a morally bad person, but other than that great job!
🎤 SpaceMonkey
06. Dec 2018 · 00:22 UTC
@spaceface14dev Thank you for playing! Indeed we wanted to include an injury system (for not using the helmet) and a "mood" system that would make unhappy workers leave or stop working. We might do it post-jam?
joh
06. Dec 2018 · 03:48 UTC
Simple and nice, doesn't seem to have fail state but you only learn at the end that your... sacrifices were bad (ignoring the ethical argument) when your score gets destroyed. Oh well. Still nice!
Thext was very blurry and art lacking, hope that post jam art thing works out. you got a nice fondation.
Raindrinker
06. Dec 2018 · 08:44 UTC
Love it! it does work incredibly well! And the balance between doing good and doing bad seems quite good! You really are "tempted" to go into the awful businessman mindset and just run with it. The "day" thing breaks the feel of the idle game, i would prefer it if it was just infinite and never stopped for your input. maybe workers could go sleep in some houses and their sleep/work ratios and hosuing qualities could come into the equation. I feel like with some polish you could have a papers-please political feel to it where there are some events and morality truly matters. Loved it!
Yngvarr
06. Dec 2018 · 16:34 UTC
Great one: simple and meditative. It's a pleasure to to see these little coffee-boosted dwarfs jamming their pickaxes (even though they don't have beards and ale, come on, every man who swings the pick with a smile all over his face has a dwarf's soul). My economist's skill made me cry, but hey, I finished with a profit... of 276 points... at the third time... :confused: nevermind. =)

Less blur and longer days would make this game better. And yeah, white letters with a yellow background look pretty difficult to read. All the other aspects, including this great programmer's art, fit each other quite solidly. Also, I can hear your music composing skill increasing. Keep it up! =)

Nice game, will definitely come back to beat my score! =D
ProdigalSon
06. Dec 2018 · 19:19 UTC
Had a bit of trouble understanding how to play the game and I wasn't sure if what I was doing was good or bad. Still, it looks like it could be a fun resource management game mixed in with an idle game. :)
digitaldude555
07. Dec 2018 · 19:32 UTC
Was the theme a social commentary, sacrificing safety and comfort for profits? Sadly I used one stimpak and then sent my score to negatives lol. Very interesting theme use, graphics were nice.
🎤 SpaceMonkey
08. Dec 2018 · 10:46 UTC
@raindrinker @yngvarr Thank you guys so much for your feedback! Having friends play the game and explain what they liked and didn't like about it, as well as giving ideas to improve it, is the best thing <3 Especially since I love your games too. I already filled our team's Trello with your ideas, and should be able to work on it this weekend :fingers_crossed:
🎤 SpaceMonkey
08. Dec 2018 · 10:55 UTC
@joh Good point on the lack of a fail state. Making bad moral choices doesn't have enough of an impact on the game itself, and just on the score right now. We wanted to include more of that but ran out of time. Thankfully, we can still try to fix-it ;-) Thanks for playing!!

@prodigalson The game is indeed hard to understand without instructions. Right now they are on the game's page. I might try to include a way to teach the players how to play in the game itself when it has a more "finished" state in terms of mechanics. Thanks for your feedback!

@digitaldude555 I'm really glad you liked our take on the theme! We tried to take it a step forward, hoping players would understand. Thank you for playing ;-)
Toulou
10. Dec 2018 · 12:06 UTC
That's surprisingly a fun game. And pretty robust too, it's fun to look at your workers moving and working on their one. It's nothing too complex but it doesn't need to be, even the simple graphics suits well the general mood of the game.
The problem being I found it a bit too easy ? I hired the max amount of low cost workers and it seems it was the best strategy, I never ran out of money afterward. Maybe a more elaborated economy would make the game more interesting ? Or a limit on how much resources you have.
Anyway, as I said it's still a good game, I had a lot of fun playing with it for a while. I was at 3500 when I clicked on the Menu button thinking it was a pause, and instead it was the game over page so...
🎤 SpaceMonkey
10. Dec 2018 · 12:34 UTC
@toulou Thanks for you feedback! I'm sorry, it's not very clear that the goal is not to make money, but to have a good score (your Uncle doesn't say that you have to make money). You actually have a score penalty when you hire red workers or do anything wrong (this represents your Uncle "disliking" your choices). We began changing the game to include the "bad side" of hiring underpaid workers in the mechanics themselves. It was the plan from the beginning but we had to cut corners to get it done in time ;-) Thanks for playing, I'll try your game asap!
jamscenter
11. Dec 2018 · 23:31 UTC
Wouauaahha 5696 !
But I prefer this play-through :)
(I drugged my workers with a good score)
https://youtu.be/ypzArw888w8

Did you make me play all night (^^') ?
🎤 SpaceMonkey
12. Dec 2018 · 08:38 UTC
@jamscenter Great score and thank you so much for posting your gameplay on youtube, it helps us a ton :thumbsup: I think you will love the next version. It will include, amongst other things, an online leaderboard.
Geckoo1337
12. Dec 2018 · 16:38 UTC
Well done. Cost in-game seem to me not really realistic, but it is just a game. The main gameplay is cool and I guess that you could improve some graphics. However at this stage it is good enough as a solid entry for the 43th LudumDare ++
paulhocker
13. Dec 2018 · 04:44 UTC
such a good game -- loved the mechanic and really worked to add balance to it -- thanks for making this
🎤 SpaceMonkey
13. Dec 2018 · 07:48 UTC
@geckoo1337 Thank you so much for playing! I've tried to contact you on twitter because I'd love to have a little chat with you, but if you don't have time for this don't worry, I can understand.

@paulhocker Thanks for noticing the effort on balance ;-) We spent the last 6 or 7 hours trying to balance the game as well as we could. We already made changes post-ld : helmets are now cheaper and we reduced the impact of RNG. I'll try to release a version after the voting period ends.
arron-fowler
15. Dec 2018 · 10:42 UTC
i really enjoyed playing it and i quite liked the graphics to it and the audio.it was a very good game
DrEvilBrain
30. Dec 2018 · 20:33 UTC
Simple, but fun. Watching all your miners chip away at the dirt is satisfying.