The Infinite Mine by SuperCrunchy
Short description
This game is a simple strategy/tower defense game set in space. Playing time is around 5-15 minutes. There are only 2 resources in this game:
- Metal
- Energy
Both can be obtained from the (many) asteroids that you can find around the base. This game cannot be "win", at some point you will either be overwhelmed by the enemies or you will run out of resources to extract. The objective of the game is to gather as much metal as possible, while not dying under the pressure of the enemies.
Online scores
Your score will be submitted to a database, in which you'll be able to compare with the rest of the players. The server was coded during ludum dare and is currently hosted at my home, so it could go offline some times :smile:.
Important
- Start by building METAL extractor, as if you run out of it, you cannot build extractors anymore (yes, it would need a good rebalance, but I didn't know how to fix it without setting the cost to 0 (suggestions are welcome!). TL;DR: Don't run out of metal or you'll not be able to build anything else.
- When you run out of energy for too long you will still lose the game. There's no visual indication of this! If you don't hear turrets shooting then you have a problem with energy.
- You need to be paying attention closely to the energy level (or the amount of energy asteroids you are mining, when you are later in the game), as without energy the turrets cannot shoot...
Tips
- Resources run out, you need to expand to stay alive, but expanding also increases your defenses requirements...
- Enemy kills count towards the score.
- if you use the same name your score will be REPLACED with the new one. You may go forward in the ladder, but you may also go back and worsen your score.
- the map is generated randomly (even though the number of asteroids is the same). You could find a map easier than another.
- The enemies are not intelligent at all, they just attack the nearest structure. They plan to win by overwhelming you with sheer numbers!
- Pay attention to enemy formations. At late stage their numbers become dangerous!
Original ideas that I didn't implement due time constraints:
- Originally I wanted this game to have a power network like creeper world (look it up! It's an excellent game!) and a more interesting distribution of the asteroids (a bit more clustered - to force the player putting weak spots /links between the clusters), but there was really no time to get it up in time.
- I also wanted some more variety both in structures and enemies, but I already found it a bit challenging to reach an acceptable balance with the only enemy that is there, so adding more was out of the question.
Update: Web version, Mac & Linux
Added web version, mac and linux versions here: https://supercrunchy.itch.io/the-infinite-mine
We still * highly reccomend using the native version*
Here are few disadvantages of the web version: - It's not able to post the scores to the web server due to CORS being disable on the server (for the moment - until I enable it) - It runs very slowly, especially when the enemy starts getting up to some big numbers.
Ratings
| Overall | 134th | 3.667⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 77th | 3.741⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 363th | 3⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 407th | 3.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 451th | 2.889⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 429th | 2.407⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 398th | 2.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 272th | 3.083⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
Maybe tomorrow I'll upload it somewhere!
Goodnight!
Btw, I found itch.io easy to use to upload the html version.
Let's say that I got time to master the game quite well after debugging it that many times :)
Thanks for the itch.io suggestion: I'll add a link to the web version now :)
For compo -- I think you made a really solid game. As a game though, I think it needs just one or two more mechanics to be really engaging. Thanks for making it! : )
Also, I see you gave an extremely long and thorough review of this game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/zynite
First, thanks for writing really good feedback! But, I regret to inform you that the game you reviewed was actually an LD38 game so you won't get coolness for it, but hopefully you helped the game creator out. Make sure you are rating from this link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/games
Thanks for telling me I rated the wrong game, otherwise I would have never noticed I thought to have clicked the correct link, but clearly I didn't :slight_frown:.
Luckily I also played a bit also his other game (by mistake) because he overwrote the windows version with the new game (and also some of the comments apply to both games), I'll surely review his other game, too.
Thanks for the notification! :grinning:
I also wanted at least 2 types of towers and enemies, but decided to invest time instead in making a high score list (I thought to be cool to be able to see what other people were able to achieve). I actually collect both metal sent and enemies killed along the score (I don't show them in game though). I should have probably sent also the time spent and the seed of the map to try playtesting it :).
I'm anyway fairly happy with the scale of the battle that can come up (especially near the end), even with only one turret an one enemy.
Another **tip** I have after seeing one of my friends playing: try to position towers well outside the base so that you are able to get from the beginning a good area that you can use for the extractors :). The winning strategy here is the "economy boom" one :)
Seeing how many people rated your game, I hope this does not mean most of the players don´t test properly :-/
To get to important things:
Fun tower / defence game in space with a huge game area. Had great fun watching my defence crowing bigger and bigger in radius, zooming more and more out.
A background music would have been great.
Good job!
The game is basically not optimized at all. I think the game worst performances are on calculating the logic of all the objects, which (if i remember correctly) uses something like a O(n^2) algorithm where n= number of objects in game (which is a quite bad idea when that n is big especially in this game). The logic is run every 1/10th of a second so you may see "choppy" performances quite easily
I noticed that especially the web version (if you played that) gets laggy quite quickly. The native ones are much better.
(There's also the 'minor detail' that I have an i7 with 8 virtual cores that may have contributed to the bad optimization...I fear it's not much representative of 'average' PCs...)
Also - nice work on the intro tutorial. Very helpful and rare for a jam!
Good job.
Overall a very solid entry!
Game mechanics is exciting, I've started and got back to life 20 minutes and 60k+ points later :smile:
Great game, a little more balance would made this game even better!
Obvious improvements would be, as you already stated, some more types of units and enemies as well as upgrades. I have to admit that I generally don't like games with the premise of inevitable demise. But I did like this one, so good job overall!