Drilbert the Drill Boy is back!

Great game! I will play it in full tomorrow.
The only thing I can add as feedback is a wish to make a volume slider for the music.

Interesting idea to make a sequel, but I did miss some connection to the theme.

Cool re-interpretation of Boulderdash, which you probably don’t know as it is 37 years old.
Back to your game: impressive implementation of “whole junks” fall as one piece done in the restricted time frame!!! It was fun playing. And a lot of levels for a jam.

@codeforjoycaro when you dig under things, they become "unstable" and fall on top of you :p

cool game! the mix of different mechanics is pretty cool, you really have to plan your actions. I also like the possibility to UNDO.

Loved it! Almost fooled me with 1x Win, but I got to 2x one eventually. Hopefully there wasn't a 3x win I missed :D

I especially liked the character animation when it's positioned sideways, really cute!

Edit: forgot to say, I was really impressed with the undo functionality, very nice touch. I'm curious, how did you implement it?

Just an awesome game! Music really fits the game. Theme is represented really good. Graphics is awesome. Movement is also really inetrestring.

Really creative game mechanic, and solid implementation of the theme.
The controls for going around corners felt a little clunky at times, but overall it was a good experience.
The puzzles were challenging enough to be fun, and leveredged the mechanics well. Really nice job!

@bakuchi thanks for playing! 2x is all I'm afraid :D
For the undo functionality: the game is written in lua, and the state of the whole map is just one big table of tile ids. Instead of actually modifying that table when you make a move, I just push your move into a list of moves, and then whenever I need the "current" version of the world, I call an "evaluate" function that copies the world table and applies the moves to it, but I never store this evaluated version. Then when I want to undo a move, it's as easy as just removing the last entry from the moves list.

^The above is the basic theory of it, and I have used this implementation straight before, but this time I ran into an extra problem. To make the blocks fall, I had to run an algorithm to segment the map into tile zones, and that needed to run several times each move. As your move list got bigger and bigger, that meant the game got slower and slower because it was doing more segmentations each frame. So in the end, I added a simple hack where I turned the "evaluate" function into a recursive function instead of a normal loop. When I had it set up that way, it was easy to add a cache to memoise the evaluation. Since the state of the world depends only on the move list and level index, I can have a cache keyed by move list. Each time the level changes I just clear the cache completely. It does mean that if you just go back and forth forever your memory usage will grow forever, but in reality the size of a full game state copy is tiny, and also it's a jam game so it's fiiiiine :p


You can see the implementation [here](https://github.com/wheybags/ld49/blob/734833d8e51f64e267b5360361f3ecdef1668e0e/game_state.lua#L130), it's a bit messy because, well, jam game, but maybe it will be helpful anyway :p

I cant wait for the *possibly* final entry into the trilogy. Nice!

@wheybags Thanks for sharing the details! Interesting solution for the falling blocks, I was wondering about that.

Awesome game. I really liked the playable win-screen and the bonus levels. It made me feel smart for trying to get to the goal on what I first thought was the end. 

My only complaint, and it is a small one, is that I didn't like the drill sfx, but I quickly forgot about that while playing due to the brilliant puzzle design and interesting movement mechanics. The other choices of sounds and music were spot on for the mood of the game, too.

Thanks for sharing!!!

This was awesome -- what a fun mechanic! It was a little unintuitive to me at first but the early levels helped to figure it out. And great graphics and music to fit it all together

Wow, this has to be one of my favorite entries so far! I really love the gameplay and unique control scheme along with the puzzle design. Having to figure out the optimal way to carve out the tiles was really fun and totally conveys the jam's theme. The music and graphics mesh well together too, the player art is really charming. Really great job!

Pretty cool entry :) had a lot of fun playing it. Reminded me of games like Boulder Dash but with more physics.

Is the "2X WIN" screen solvable?

@huntthewumpus Thanks for playing! Nope, that's the end, for real :p

Wow, this was great! A little weird at first blush, but then you quickly get the hang of it. The simple puzzles are a little trivial, but once it gets into the thick of it I enjoyed thinking through the later levels. Would have been disappointed at the "halfway end" point, but the rest of it really sealed the deal for me, without overstaying its welcome.

Made it to the 2X WIN! Super nice game. Mechanics are awesome, and you've done a lot to use them to their fullest puzzle-y potential. Very impressive how many thought-provoking levels there are, and I imagine that the "physics" took a lot of time, and possibly dealing with a lot of edge cases. Also love the character and art style overall. And although the music is great, the only feature I would add would be a way to turn music on/off. Great stuff!

Great game but sounds very high and i didnt find settings for mute or make lower =(
Anyway good job!

some neat puzzles towards the end! The first few levels to teach me how the mechanics of movement worked were nicely done. The 1x win v. 2x win is a cool design decision to let people know they're on the bonus/hard levels; I like it a lot (I remember you did it in drilbert 1 as well)

I'm reminded of https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/keke-in-the-caves-of-peril from last LD; did you play it? Similar and yet very different because in this game you can move upwards freely

@pancelor Thanks for playing! I didn't see it last time, but I will check out keke in the caves of peril, it looks like my kind of jam game :D

Pretty cool game!

I like the way that the end screen is playable and makes bonus levels available. This is just a fun way to implement bonus levels.

The way the game teaches the player mechanics is really well done. In particular, the second screen, which teaches us that the flag is the goal and that coin collection is mandatory, is pretty brilliant in how it teaches the player.

I also think that the way the interlocking falling parts work is super cool. That last bonus level in particular I thought really made good use of the physics engine. I admit I would kind of like to be able to see the blocks falling with continuous motion, rather than the tile-based physics, but that is a tall order. (And, I wonder if having continuous motion in the game would make it harder to understand some of the puzzle mechanics...?)

But, either way, this game is just a really solid puzzle game. I think it's one of the best LD49 games I've played.

Very fun puzzle game, the last puzzles before the 2x WIN are really great, well done!