Ruby Hole by Aleksey4adoff
PLAY NOW! 🎮
Summary
The gnomes are trying to get rich off the rubies 💎 they find, digging tunnels deeper and deeper as long as their conscience and construction tiles hold out. Exploring the depths requires caution—no one knows what the gnomes might dig up next 🐉
Story
Deep within the bowels of ancient mountains, two daring gnomes, Borin Stonebiter and Thrommir Ironbeard, labor to create a tunnel that will lead them to treasures hidden for millennia. Despite the elders' warnings, these enterprising treasure seekers decided to begin mining the oldest land. Around them is only the echoing sound of picks and the dim light of torches illuminating the gloomy vaults of the mine. The rock here is hard as if the earth itself resists their efforts, but the gnomes do not despair: after all, in the depths awaits a cache of rubies shining brighter than stars. 🌟
Borin, an experienced miner with muscular arms and a cunning gaze, keeps count of his pickaxe strikes, each time digging deeper into the stone mass. His partner, Thrommir, a calculating and cautious master blacksmith, occasionally checks the sharpness of the tools' blades to make the work go faster and more efficiently. Together they form the perfect team: one digs, the other supports, both dream of wealth waiting at the end of the path. 💰
Each blow of the pick brings them closer to their goal. Each ruby found fills their hearts with joy and hope. And although there is still much work ahead, Borin and Thrommir are confident: someday they will reach their coveted prize and become legends among all gnomes, but at what cost? 💀
Contacts
https://x.com/epiclogogames
https://t.me/epiclogogames
https://vk.com/epiclogogames
art https://vk.com/shkaflavasha by @lev-the-sock-puppet
Tutorial
We understand that a wall of text is a bad tutorial, but we didn't want to give up game features in favor of learning (even though we had to due to limited time), so we'll have to read.
FAST EDITION:
- Right click — place tile;
- Left click — rotate tile;
- Complete mushroom caves to get NEW tiles;
- To complete caves you can use edges of the map as well;
FULL MANUAL:
use left mouse button for place tile on map, and use right mouse button for rotate tile to right side
to build tunnels, you need to connect tiles so that the tunnels on them match
to build mushroom caves, you need to connect tiles so that the caves on them match
until all the borders of the existing mushroom farm tiles are closed, you will not receive bonuses for building a cave.
to get new tiles for completing the mushroom cave, you need to close all the borders of the tiles already exposed on the field with mushrooms.
the border can be combined with any title, and the side of the mushroom farm in contact with the border is considered closed.
A ruby is just a small ruby that turns out to be right in the rock, no bonuses except for the pleasant feeling of the weight of the pocket.
Ruby Hole is the main reward for any dwarf, the more rubies the more rubies! You need to bring the tunnel to all the ruby holes you can reach.
| itch | https://epiclogo.itch.io/ruby-hole |
| github | https://github.com/rogovenko/RubyHole |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/ruby-hole |
Ratings
| Overall | 110th | 4.018⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 113th | 3.915⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 298th | 3.482⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 36th | 4.366⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 107th | 4.354⭐ | 84🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 178th | 3.532⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 142th | 4.038⭐ | 82🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 146🗳️ | 158🗨️ |
The onboarding could be a bit smoother besides being a wall of text. I did succumb to it after my first horrible try but didn't even find that much good information there. Like it wasn't mentioned anywhere that you can actually rotate the tiles. Or that the mushroom farms give you more tiles to play with. Both of which are pretty essential to succeeding. Some small pop/pulse animation on the tile amount when completing a farm section would have been a nice touch to drive that point home.
Would make more sense to penalize skip somehow as you might just as well now skip all curves when you don't need to turn and also 99% of the empty tiles. Didn't really figure out what the small ruby tiles do. I'm guessing they give you more "score" but didn't figure out how to trigger them. Seemed very rare too and on my final and obviously longest run didn't even see any. Would probably make more sense to have like "a deck" of tiles so you wouldn't be bitten by possible bad luck. Also would help estimating/counting whether it's the time to close a mush farm to keep growing it for a few more tiles (seemed like the plus you gain is exponential).
Also two of my three runs started off giving me a mushroom block that was completely impossible to place at the start. The invisible biome change border also was kinda mean as it can easily mess up your mushroom farm.
But yeah, fun stuff. Good job! 👍
Maybe add a tip that you turn the tiles, i didnt realize this at after restaring 1 time already. (Maybe im just dumb :D)
The help guide was nice and teaches the mechanics but it kinda breaks the immersion when I need to scroll down to look to remind what was i supesed to do. This isint usually a big problem, but since the game was pretty smooth and nice otherwise, it stood out to me. And there was quite a lot of examples given also.
The tile laying of caves is nice but the road laying felt little flat since you were supposed to go only down? (Guesss there was additional mechanics planned or i didnt encounter them)
Felt pretty carcassony in a good way and the tiles matched nicely, I really liked this.
and it's also very nice to meet Russian speakers :)
In my first run, I didn't realize that you needed to put a tile below the ruby in order to reveal the next part, so I tried to fill out the space to find the next ruby.
After that I needed 2 other tries to win.
The small dialog between the rubies are fun :-)
Great work.
Nice work!
What made it a little frustrating for me was not beign able to build paths farther ahead. I get that the dwarves are digging the path inside the path, so it wouldn't make sense to dig further ahead, but still. Maybe what made it frustrating is not beign able to get the part you really need, so you have to discard many pieces until you get it. Maybe it would have been nice if I had some kind of pieces storage where I could keep an important part to use later.
Anyways I actually enjoyed it, and that ending looks really cool!
Overall solid game though. I really love the art and in-between scenes. Well done.
Art is amazing, the story adds to the experience, I didn't read the wall of text but the pictures were enough to tell me what's going on (also I am familiar with Carcassone and Dorfromantik). Very solid entry. Great job! I really enjoyed playing it. It feels very polished. I failed at 45 but mostly because the reddish mushrooms were growing... well, quite a bit, and I haven't been paying attention to the number of tiles left. I'll probably play again.
(Btw on Itch if you edit you can add a tag "ludum-dare-57", and then below there will be a textbox for a LDjam url, and that would give you a widget on top of the game with the link to this page and your game will appear on the list of all LDjam games on Itch).
@gargantuan-janitor we've already thought of that. The backlog has already been compiled and we will finish these tiles!
@dstoc In the current version of the game, the last tile with a connecting tunnel to the third Ruby Hole means the end of the game.
@tiar thanks for great idea about "see the whole mine" and advice about editing on itch
It was fun, I enjoyed it!
At some point in the game I had more fun making mushroom combinations than creating paths for the jewels. You even managed to make the secondary mechanics of the game fun.
Congratulations!
Great job, solid entry, and I have fun playing it!
