Edge Digger by Arthur Tang
🕹️ Edge Digger
HTML Access
https://saikiosamu.itch.io/edge-digger
🎮 Game Controls
For survival, dig down as far as you can! Who knows, you PROBABLY can find yourself a safe spot down there, hehe!
- Q/E — Dig Left/Right
- Space — Dig Down
- A/D — Move Left/Right
- Mouse Left Click — Close interupting windows & Enter CAPTCHA
✨ About the Game
Our game's name came from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I love that show! Player will play as a dashing female agent digging down data in a Matrix-style & Cyberpunk-style world.
:family: Our Team
- @atoxigner, our Lead Designer. His creative mindset helped detailized most of the game systems and implemented Audio for the game.
- @ashe-liu, our Technical Artist, she created fantastic post processing effects and some UI animation for the game.
- @laine-lai, our Music Composer / Sound Engineer, she single handedly carried our game audio. The music she made is worth millions.
- @pppppppp, our 3D artist, the arm model he created for our main menu and pause menu is insane. The first time I looked at it, I thought it's one of the heirloom from Apex Legends.
- @shacozha, our amazing Game Programmer, most of the game systems are his coding work. He helped a lot in version control.
- @xiaoxie33, our Lead Artist, he created insane concept, environmental objects' animation, and UI elements for the team. We couldn't make it without him.
- @xichan-zheng, our 2D Artist, she created the cutest 2D character I've ever seen. All the smooth character animations are her artwork. She also designed GameOver menu and our cover page.
- Lastly it's me, @arthur-tang, I worked as a Producer, Programmer, and Technical Artist this time. I helped put everything together. Spent some time solving people's questions and problems.
🚀 Play the Game
The WebGL format can be played on itch.io with the link down below. You can also download the windows version here or on itch.io.
📥 Download Instructions:
Download the zip file called EdgeDiggerWin, unzip it and access the game by clicking at "Edge Digger.exe".
If you had fun playing this game, please leave a comment! It will be awesome if you can post the screenshot of your score here as well. Let's see who is the best Edge Digger!!!
| Link | https://saikiosamu.itch.io/edge-digger |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/cyber-digger-for-now |
Ratings
| Overall | 205th | 3.842⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 251th | 3.651⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 303th | 3.474⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 360th | 3.816⭐ | 78🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 243th | 4.054⭐ | 76🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 149th | 3.833⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 472th | 2.706⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 326th | 3.743⭐ | 74🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 92🗳️ | 154🗨️ |
I tried my best...
However, since the game contains quite a few elements, it can feel slightly overwhelming for new players at the beginning. Some fonts are not particularly easy to read, especially when the information density is high, which can occasionally make the experience a bit confusing.
Additionally, the randomly generated block feature sometimes leads to dead-end situations where the player gets stuck without any way to proceed. This could be a bug, but if it's intentional, I think it’s quite cool – I actually enjoy this small touch of “malicious design.”
I also like the nearby password lock puzzle mechanic, but it seems to only increase the score. I initially thought that failing too many times or skipping it would result in a difficulty increase.
Regarding the random error QTE mechanism, it seems that its spread and frequency do not change significantly throughout the game. As a result, the difficulty mainly hinges on the bullet-hell attacks and the block obstacles. It might be more interesting if, during the later stages, the spread of QTE errors increased or the number of occurrences became more frequent.
Overall, I think it’s a truly impressive design with a lot of potential!
Jokes aside, I love how much effort you put into art, seeing the final version of the arm animation I've seen in the feed sometime during the jam really makes you see the progress, even if the final result is a tad bit low res. That said, I feel like the game is trying to have 3 different clashing art styles that don't really fit together (the graffiti style title, realistic cyberpunk arm animation and then pixel art in the actual game).
Gameplay wise, it took me quite a while to understand what the keypad is supposed to do, maybe making the keypad work with the numbers on the keyboard as well would make it more intuitive.
Apart from those, great work :raised_hands:
Where I would like to see it improved/expanded upon if you want to further develop this:
- upgrades/items you can use.
- different layers of depth having different physics/pros&cons for gameplay variety.
- maybe the errors entering less at the start and more and more the deeper you go.
Strong cyberpunk vibe, i only wish i could dig horizontal with the same button as move.
Main menu is very cool.
Ads blocking view and codes on right side are great ideas! I played dig oddysey not so long ago, your execution of digging down is way more intense and and i like overall stylistic
the difficulty spike at the beginning made it difficult to get into the game, but after a game or two, I managed to go far, it was fun
You've struck an amazing balance with the difficulty - it was fun trying to focus on both sides of the screen at the same time, and I fell in a hole at one point that I couldn't get out of because I was focusing on the code input, which felt really fair as a reason to lose!
I noticed some slightly inconsistent behavior with the falling ERROR messages:
If I pushed against the right and let go, I was safe from the error messages
However if I pushed on the left side of a block and let go, the error messages got me, causing a death at this point. I died a couple of times when I wasn't sure what got me - think it was this?
Hope that's OK!
Thanks for the game, and good work! :)
Love it, great ambiance, great gameplay, great music! Well done! At first I did'nt understand the error messages were evil (I tougth it was part of the aesthetic) maybe making them more dangerous visually might help
(i love how you describe everyone contribution in laudatory terms, seems you all had a great jam!)
Good job ^^
CURRENT RECORD HOLDER!
Gameplay’s simple but kept me hooked, and it has that “just one more try” kind of feel. Definitely feels like something you could build on even more if you wanted to.
Awesome job, had a great time playing!
Very fun game! There's a certain focus you need to have to balance all the tasks properly, if you start panicking at all things go downhill so fast. It's a neat game mechanic. Also feels extremely polished, the music, art, and game feel are done so well.
You all did a great job working together to pull this off during the jam. Well done!
The menu is insanely polished! Great pacing with short runs of just a couple minutes! Overall just great :)
But since the point of these comments is to give feedback . . . To me, speeding up the game on missed captchas sort of competes with the core concept of the screen getting more and more cluttered while speeding up on it's own accord. Maybe failing a captcha could instead just spawn 3 windows? or maybe have a row blocked that you need to have entered the captcha before you can pass? I think it could be balanced basically the same, but communicating the popup idea even clearer :)
I think that I'd prefer WASD movement -> so dig left right with A and D and dig down with S. I can see that forcing the player having to concentrate at multiple things at once fits the game. But once again, the core concept is strong enough, and I didn't like it when I accidentally tried to walk left instead of digging left.
Anyways, well done! It's a banger
think I'd find the experience *much* smoother if movement in general was removed? I know that sounds weird, but what I mean is that I feel like pressing the dig directions should have the character "dash" to that position in the grid. There's not really a need for platforming, and there's no situation where I felt like I'd need to dig somewhere I don't then need to move to. It would let me just feel a lot more free to get lost in it! And yes as others said I'd totally make the captcha more obvious that it's present, and maybe tone down the popups a little. It's a ocol idea but does get a bit frustrating quickly. The music and sound design is excellent, I love the wya them usic hcanges and has that filter applied when in the menus. Not sure what the menu animation is about but it looks sleek!
Not having those would probably be preferred, but maybe they could serve some purpose as additional (rare) obstacles and you'd need another mechanic (like jumping) to trace your steps back a few blocks and choosing a different way?
Overall, it's a solid fast-paced game! I'm not very good at it, but it did give me the feeling of getting better with each run, not to mention the "one more run!" approach seemed to come naturally. The soundtrack definitely helped with that. :)
