A game where you have to dig deeper and deeper to access the precious dino juice, until your inevitable demise, be it because of a market crash or resource exhaustion.

Description

Place probes and do radar screening of the ground under you to find oil deposit, then drill wells to extract oil and sell it to an extremely volatile oil market (choose your time right to sell your oil).

Watch out for the black, shiny patches on the map, they indicate a shallow oil deposit that should be accessible by the cheapest, most rudimentary equipment, a great way to get your business started.

Oil deposits will gradually loose pressure as you extract from them, requiring more advanced, expensive and energy consuming rigs to exploit. You don't win at this game. You just make as much money as possible and let future generations worry about resource depletion!

For an in-depth (pun intended) explanation of the mechanics, physical models and oil deposit generation, take a look at this blog post.

• Language: C
• Engine: 3dmr (custom, homebrew 3D engine).
• Assets: blender
• Icons: gimp

Quick description of buttons

How to play

Move the camera by moving the cursor to the sides of the window, much like in an Age of Empire game.

First, try to find a black, shiny patch on the map, then build a basic well on top of it.

To build a well, click on the icon at the bottom left of your screen and place it anywhere that's free.

You can select a well with left click and unselect it with right-click.

When you select a well, it will display an information window showing the status, progress, current depth and oil field reached as well as important physical information such as pressure at the surface, debit (unit of oil per second), operating cost (dollars per second) and energy input (unit of oil per second).

The well will start building, and upon completion it will start drilling, until the first oil deposit is met or max depth is reached, whichever comes first. The information window will show you the status of the drilling in real time.

You can remove the well by clicking on destroy in the well's information window.

The oil spills (black patches) only indicate shallow fields but there are many more underground. To find them, use radar and probes.

To use the radar: click on one of the three "radar probes" icons (at the beginning the cheapest one is more than enough), the cursor's color should become blue. Click at several locations on the map to create a path (2 points is enough), then press enter. If you can afford the path length, a radar window should appear, showing a vertical slice of the ground under the path you created. The green patches indicate high probability of an oil field.

To get an exact idea of the fields layout, use a digging probe. Click on one of the icons with an interrogation mark and place it like a well. It will behave like a well except it will go through all oil fields until max depth is reached.

To reach deeper fields, you will need better and more expensive wells.

Maximum depths

• Wells: 20 ($10), 100 ($200), 150 ($1000), 1000 ($9000)
• Digging probes: 30 ($5), 300 ($200)
• Radars: 50 ($5/m), 100 ($20/m), 200 ($100/m)

How to pump

Each oil field has an internal pressure, which is generated at random between 1 and 10, but the pressure you see at the surface is different and decreases with the depth of the field (the deeper the field, the less pressure you'll get at the surface). The internal pressure of the field will also decrease as you pump oil from it.

The oil output (debit) of your well is proportional to the pressure at the surface. So if the pressure is too low or even negative, you won't extract any oil. You need to start putting energy into your rig, you can do that by selecting the rig and pressing page up and page down to respectively increase and decrease the energy input. You should see the Ei will increase, and so will the debit. Make sure that the debit is greater than the energy input, otherwise you'll be using more oil than what you get out.

Tips

• To start, just put basic wells on the black patches on the map.
• You can drill as many wells as you want on each deposit, just make sure you understand the shape of the deposit so that the well can reach it (use probes and radar).
• Wells cost you money to run so make sure they are viable (debit * marketPrice > operating cost), you can destroy them if they are not.
• Don't sell all your oil at once, the market might have some good surprises for you in the future.
• Some maps can be MUCH harder than others, do not hesitate to re-run the game if you loose too fast.

Modification log post-jam

There is still a lot of balancing to do, we'll keep you updated on this page.

• 27-04-2021: balanced parameters, market can't go under 1$, market will increase faster and faster as you sell more oil, bug fixes.

Have fun!