Interesting concept, I have never played A game like this, until today. Keep Up the good work!

Gooooood!

I've lost all of my potatoes... I'm sad... But good job!

It took me a hot minute to figure out what to do, then I went back and looked at the LD page. Honestly it's a great and innovative concept, I haven't played anything like it before.
Keep it up :)

Nice game! I found the mechanics of the game very interesting to play around with, it's quite innovative in that sense. I would have appreciated a tutorial of some kind but I understand it's hard to do that in a Jam, and also some sort of goal to work towards, maybe a small trophy once you hit 1000 coins or something. That being said, I enjoyed your game very much!

Hi @ilyas-aqil thank you for your feedback! At the bottom of the map there must be a Diamond to reach to win the game (you should see it in the darkness, it shines). Probably we had to explain it in the "quick guide" :-)

This is very cool!
I also have never seen this type of gameplay before
It probably would ruin the fun but I wished to have a pause button to plan my next move

Very different from what i have experienced before. I loved the game all around!

I had fun with it! Sort of a Lemmings-esque experience. The characters are cute, too bad I couldn't save them...

I made it to the end! I had trouble keeping all of the molatoes alive, so I decided to just work with one. With the one he was still a bit of a struggle, but slowly, he made his way around, until I ran out of cash. Then I just heard him mining, slowly and steadily, in the darkness. Then I seen rocks falling - once, twice, three times. But he survived. And he came out of the darkness to the diamond. Really really fun game. If their AI was tightened up a bit it'd be perfect!

@samarthmp5002 @unbansheee @zype
Thank you. I really appreciate that you liked the concept. Glad you had fun :smile:

@maybeagoose @sandcastlesstudio @arancutter
Thank you for trying this out!

@nardandas
thank you, you described your experience the same way we did during development :smile:

We released an update, polishing some stuff and adding (finally!) a game menu. If anybody is interested it is now available!

Really had fun playing this one. Great job!

Technically quite an impressive entry between the AI, stress meter and falling blocks. The gameplay was quite hard to control and would have liked to see a little more forgiving gameplay.

My molatoes are safe \o/

Awesome concept, really fun

Could easilly be pushed into a nice deeply systemic game

Nice one :thumbsup:

A very enjoyable little game. It started off very chaotic, but as the molatoes got themselves killed, it was easier to keep track. To my surprise, I managed to reach the diamond, so good job on the difficulty balancing!

The molatoes got stuck now and then, and I had to waste money on a sign to get them moving again, but other than that it was a pretty smooth experience.

Neat ideas in the game. Had a hard time surviving. Working with the potatoes was difficult. Maybe there needs to be a radius for the arrows.

I really like the concept of this one! The game is just too hard I think. If you could slow the down the molatoes and given the option to buy some little dudes it would be more enjoyable in my opinion. Great submission.

I love the base concept of the game. :gem: The graphics felt a bit nostalgic, reminded me of some games I played as a kid. The sound effect and music were well made. I believe it is quite impressive if you consider that you had 20 hours to make the first build. Awesome work! :wink: :peanuts: :peanuts: :pick: :gem:

Just one remark: The aspect ratio of the tutorial image felt a bit off.

This feels a lot like the game "Dwarfs!", which I like a lot. It's a bit difficult to understand what is going on when you run out of money to buy lanterns, and sometimes molatoes seemed to die with a delay because the died with no obvious reasons except for falling or getting a boulder on their head a second ago. The sounds, as simple as they are really add to the feel of the game.
On issue I had is that I had moltatoes that bugged out after spawning. One got stuck on half the height of a block that was already gone, running itself up against the edge of the one next to it. I couldn't place a sign there though, because the moltatoe was still at surface level. Another issue was that a moltatoe.. flew around from left to right before it landed and started mining.
Anyway, congratulations on making this game! It's a fun one and I think it would be could if you expanded this into a more fully-fledged project!

Love the graphic, nice work!.

@guladam thanks for playing. This is our second jam and we approached development with a better task definition and time optimization. By the way work to do was conspicuous and our in-time release had some bug and lacked the menu screen finalized.
Feedback like yours make me think that our time was well spent, thank you, sincerely.

I initially thought this would be a Lemmings-esque game but I quickly realized it was its own beast. After I saw how difficult it was going to be, I put on my thinking cap.

One of my first strategies was to corral all the molatoes off to 1 side with signs. Can't have a ceiling fall on you if there's no ceiling! It didn't take too long before I realized the folly of this decision - you'll run out of money eventually.

A few strats later, I figured I could ignore the signs and just focus on keeping the miners alive with reinforcements. It'd be a bit like an aim trainer at that point, just quickly recognizing when parts would collapse and stop it. That ran into the same issue of running on of money too, as it was pretty dependent on RNG without signs.

Finally I came to the strat that others seemed to find most effective: just keeping 1 alive. I got very far with this tactic, a bit into the total darkness area before I was pelted with a stray rock.

This game was fun to try to figure out! I suspect the "proper" way to play is to properly use signs to point miners at the ore, and using that ore to keep reinforcements up. I'd LOVE to see a video of people playing this game w/o resorting to using a solo molatoe, I feel like I could learn a lot from that.

@nicso @sugarsugarsugar @sam-minh @eugenik Thanks for playing and appreciating :smile:

@itskdog yeah, there were some (now upgraded) artifact in molatoes AI which made the game a little too much confusionary. Game idea, though, is that it should be hard enough to catch your attention. Thanks for your feedback!

@divford Thanks for enjoying it! Ye, in the rush I made some confusion writing the AI :blush:

@peachtreeoath what a lovable full description of your game experience. that's exactly what I find most rewarding. Thank you! And anyway you figured out both the intended way of playing (the one we intended) and the exploit many players found to maximize winning chances :smirk:

As far as now I tightly virtually hug you all for trying our game. I/we will consume with the deserved attention your submissions as soon as I/we can

@sigill thanks for your detaild description of your experience in our molato mine! I appreciate that you noticed and enjoyed every polish aspect we tried to include. About bugs in the AI I feel the blow and manage to fix them. Thank you again for testing this, really!

Rip my little potatoes <3

Great game! very funny!

Really fine idea. Nice realization has well. Thnak you for your game

Very nice idea, Molatoes are so cute :heart: I recommend to read the tutorial, or at least find out what the things do :smile: But I finnished the game eventually! :slight_smile:

My LP video :slight_smile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji3RDcz9eFE

Thanks for the game, it's very nice, I had a good time on it, it's hard to manage all the molatoes, they run to their death :c

thanks to you and keep it up ! ♥

@molpe ahahah, thank you for your funny gameplay video on our game!
We have this game built in the jam's time and from tuesday we started to do some major fix.
I'm glad you found it entertaining and full of cuteness, indeed we needed a way to have people taking care of the molatoes :smile:

Hey matey, thanks for submitting your game to stream! I had fun playing it, and I hope you found the feedback useful! Here's the vod if ya wanna rewatch it;

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1006003249

I liked this game, it's simple and has some kind of physics. Well done!

Very good even for a full 48 hours. It's a unique idea that's challenging and interesting. I didn't find much use for the signs, except I used one right at the very end when I had one potato left and he was missing the diamond by a few tiles. Way too hectic to do more than just keep them alive. Using the number keys as hotkeys for the items would be a great quality-of-life improvement so I don't have to move my mouse up and down and up and down the whole screen all the time.

Very nice! You did a good job balancing the difficulty

Interesting concept. I wish you had more time to flesh out the idea as I think with some better UI and being able to tell better how you are influencing the moles. Money seemed to not really be a big issue until the moles were trying to kill themselves with cave ins which took me a little bit to figure out how the reinforcements worked. Good job.

Very interesting gameplay, I really liked the Idea. A bit hardcore for me but I'm a noob when under pressure :D

@bmacintosh Thank you for sharing your experience! Signs can be useful to guide your Molatoes to gather bigger gold vein or to keep them packed for an easier management. But their usefulness depends on the map and on what molatoes choose to do :-)

As for the hotkeys you should be able to select every skill using key 1 to 5 on the top of your keyboard (not numeric keypad). If it doesn't work probabily it's a bug :-(

@sirred Thank you for your feedback! As for now money are really map and Molatoes dependent... Some maps have more gold than other and sometimes Molatoes do their best to screw your game and you have to spend a lot of money to keep them safe and to guide them to victory!

@tomtomgome Thank you! Yes, we know that sometimes the game can be very hard. We thought about adding something to slow down o stop for a bit the Molatoes (es. a sandwich that they have to eat while stanting still and that heal them) but unfortunately we runned out of time before we could implement such feature. We'll think about it if we manage to develop it into a full game.

This was amazing if extremely difficult :D I loved it. I felt the difficulty of managing a large team early on was a bit too high and it felt almost inevitable that most of my molatoes would die while trying to leave enough resources for the final chosen survivor to get to the diamond... I have no idea how you'd improve this though. I guess an FTL style pause would have made it a lot easier but maybe would have also destroyed some of the frantic fun.

Very interesting and challenging idea! Cool execution as well. It might be hard at first but it doesn't take much time to get good at it. Good job! Very fun game! :D

@peachtreeoath unfortunately I haven't been able to register the whole game (forgot to change config on my Geforce Experience) but I managed to do a 5 Molatoes win with a bit of luky => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIP8Ifn54yo

On the start I let them roam trying to do some economy and to led them to the biggest veins with signs... When them entered the darkest area I packed all the 5 molatoes alive (I've lost one while they where roaming) to the right triyng to spend fewer coin on lights and reinforcements. I've been lucky that my Molatoes encountered a couple of big veins so I didn't run out of money.

Ahhhh ok, nice control! I tried to do that but wasn't as good with my reinforcement placement and let too many stray guys die.

Lemmings-like nostalgia. Made nicely, a ready-to-play game with casualties (which could be funnier). At first, was hard to manage all the moles, but then, when one was left, almost got him (soo clooose) to diamond. Thanks for the entry, enjoyed!

Really interesting and hard game. I think this game need active pause or more ways to control molatoes? Really greay job!

Funny game, good job

@terrykk Thank you for your feedback. We thought about some way to slow Molatoes (like give them something to eat that make them stant still for a while) but unfortunately there wasn't time to add it on the game. Maybe we'll expand the game in the future and we'll add something to better control the Molatoes :-)

@fy0 Thank you! Glad you liked it :-)

What else do you need besides a potato miner? Very cool idea)

I ended up using only the basic and glowy support, the arrows and the pillow seemed a bit useless. That's basically everything I have to complain about, it's a really nice jam game that is fun to play. Well done!

@dobrila Thank you for your feedback. As for now pillows and arrows are situational... sometimes you find a map with a lot of gold and you don't need signs to drive your Molatoes to the veins... in other maps you find few crevasses so pillows aren't a "must use". I think that they are both needed if you want to try to get to the diamond with as many molatoes as possible (i.e. on the "5 molatoes win" that I posted few comments above). Here another play in which I tried to keep them packed with signs and saved a lot of "falling damage" with pillows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg3_89vk-OI

Probably we should have added something that makes them a must use o some goal to reach (es. win with at least 3 molatoes alive).

The game is pretty entertaining (pretty hard too! haha)
I think things like "get to the diamond with 3 molatoes at least" might fix people waiting patiently for their unique survivor to reach the bed stone, but on the other hand I think it's an interesting strategy too, like have most of them killed at the beginning and keep the money for the chosen one.
Plus it's not that easy to pull off cause one molatoe means much, much less income.
But that's only my opinion ^^

Very good concept, straight to the theme, and a really challenging game! I loved it, great work!

Ps: i know that music, amazing reference! haha

Good job with the game. It was a cool concept to play around with and it was fun trying to keep them alive. I ended up with basically just two that I focused on keeping alive as the dug to victory. The game did feel very chaotic in the beginning since you are still feeling out how to play while you have the most molatoes to manage.

Such a nice game. The molatoes are so cute. Most of them perished quite quickly, but Jeff made it all the way to the diamond! It reminds me a little bit of the old Lemmings game.

As other mentioned, the beginning is indeed quite chaotic and I lost most of them quite quickly. It was easier to only focus on one and keep him alive. However, once I had him set up and secure-ish, I would have liked a respawn mechanic. Maybe click on their hut and for 200 potatoes you can hire a new miner or something like that. Nevertheless, a great and very cute entry! :)

I managed to make it to the bottom after a couple of tries! The game gets significantly easier the less are alive, which may take away a bit of strategy since you can just focus on one to win. To circumvent this, it may be a good idea to release new Molatoes periodically instead of all at once and have the health of each diminish over time (do Molatoes age?). That way, there would be focus on creating a safe, sustainable mine for the future Molatoes to quickly navigate. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the silliness and concept overall :)

Really impressive for 20 hours. On my first time all my molatoes died except one but i still managed to win lul. Love highlighted text in description, reminds me Slay the Spire. Will be glad to see your next game, good luck.

@alyd-asmar Thank you for your feedback, we really appreciated it. We thought of something similar to fix the "mono Molato" strategy but unfortunately we hadn't time to implement it.

@miltonnh25 Win with just 1 Molato alive is quite simple but take 2 Molatoes to the victory begins to be a nice challenge, great job! We will try to find a way to make the beginning of the game clearer :-)

@likirus Wow, well done Jeff! We thought about adding the ability to buy other Molatoes but we should have to implement something to make them go "down" faster otherwise players remains focused on the lower one and the new Molatoes are useless (maybe an elevetor). Furthermore it's really hard to manage far apart Molatoes, even if they're in the same screen... In the jam we didn't have time to deal with these problems.

@adonisdevs Intresting mechanic the one about the eaging Molatoes! We'll think about it. But remember... Molatoes has family too... You should try to save them all and make them rich even if it's hard! Unless you are an heartless mine manager...

@thiefviolinist Thank you! It has been quite a challenge to put all togheter in 20 hours! Well done to win on your first game :-)

Made it! I definitely found it difficult to direct more than just the one haha. At the very end I ran out of resources and the last one managed to correctly find its way in the dark! Yay!

Curious how you went about doing the procedural generation! Would enjoy hearing more about your techniques!

Really nice job, an impressive amount of systems work for a game jam :) And that soundtrack really made me want to play some KSP...


@alpharock6 thanks for trying out our newest update! It is indeed hard to manage all the molatoes as every game is different a there is not balancing on how every game can be forgiving or not :confounded:
Concerning you interest in procedural algorithm I can tell you that we used perlin noise to carve holes in the grid and a flood/fill algorithm pick every hole and decide to fill it with ore or leave as a chasm.
Thanks again for participating!

Congratulations on the game, I found the style very fun, reminded me of Lemmings in a mining version, beautiful graphics and charismatic characters, really a great game full of challenges, I hope it will have more upgrades in the future, and keep evolving that will be more and more fun, a big hug , and I await your feedback on my game I will be very happy, thank you my friends.

Очень цельная и сложная игра для джема, поздравляю! Не каждый такое осилит. Надеюсь, вы будете развивать ее дальше.

I think the game has a great replayability. I played a couple of times.

@sublustris

Спасибо, это было большим испытанием для нас. И самые полезные - это комментарии, подобные вашему. Большое спасибо!

@gamescodedogs Thanks a lot, it is really important for us to collect feedback form you. Chances are that we will improve it in the next future!

I really wanted to love this. The art is great, the concept is original, the genre is right down my alley and the execution seems so good. But I found the game overall to be a bit too much out of my control. The signs don't really help in my opinion. The molatoes should have their own drive to find and collect gold. The molatoe house should automatically spawn new moles after a certain level and more quality of life improvements I could wish for.
But after all, that is being picky. I stand with what I wrote in my first sentence and will still give this game a good score, because it has a lot of good aspects.

Ok I tried but failed, Its very hard, sometimes the molatoes dies and I dont know why. Maybe they cant go in the dark, or is there fall damage. Fun game, congrats for the team!

I led 1 molato to the victory! It tooks 3 attempts to me.
Great one. I hope you will get high innovation rank (I know that this is similar to lemmings but lemmings are not molatoes!)

p.s. Is it some kind of reference to Ludum Dare 26 with unofficial potato theme? :)

@gamescodedogs lol, I recognized your avatar. I will checkout your game too.


I Did it!

In the early stages it's hard to take care of all of your molatoes but i when you only have 1 / 2 it gets easier.

I like this entry! Make some changes and add something to buy molatoes :)

Interesting concept. I like the mechanics of group digging, giving guidance to the molatos haha. The graphics are beautiful and the sound is good. The gameplay is a little confusing at first, but then everything is ok. Congratulations.

@tek Congratulations for your victory! We avoided the possibilty to buy new molatoes because we thought it would be really difficult to control both the new ones and the old nearer the bottom. We'll think a way to avoid this problem after the jam :-)

@vphyre Thank you for your feedback! You indeed have right, on the first game the start is a big mess, but we found it really funny and challenging. We really would have liked to create a sort of "introduction" (or even just a couple of tunnels already dug with some signs and reinforcement as example) but unfortunately we run out of time.

@alprog Lool, no, we didn't know the story of the unofficial potato theme on LD26! I had to search a bit to understand what you were saying :-) You did a good job with your victory and we are glad that you liked the game!

@felo07 The game can be quite hard but also "Hell deep is your love" is not a joke :-) Molatoes dies when they take too much damage. They take damage from falling down or when a rock falls on theyr head. The dark doesn't do any damage but it makes more difficult to check what's going on and save your molatoes, that's why we put the wood lanterns. We are happy you liked it!

@j0ye Thank you for your feedback. Signs are a bit situational, if you are lucky you can win without using them. But they are necessary if you try to win with 2+ molatoes alive. If you look up I posted a video in wich I lead 5 molatoes to victory. I've been really lucky but signs helped me to keep my molatoes all together, making easier for me to keep them alive. We also thought about letting them gather gold on their own but we feared that it was too easy. We'll consider your suggestions for the next updates! Thanks again.