very promising game as always, great ui and art and gameplay
theres a bug right now for me, where the 25% total sell price boost is shown properly on the sell window, but I only get the original price paid to me.
Theres another sell price bug too thats probably worse, where crafted glasses and jewelry gets sold for 51x the base value... so I'm getting $62,500 instead of $1,250 for 1 rose glasses, and $397,800 instead of $7,800 for 1 antanium-diamond necklace. at least it gave me a lot of money to try fun miners that went so fast it looked like they broke the game after I finished everything lol
I unlocked everything and i think right now the balance needs a lot of work.
Im leaving a lot of feedback about it because I this game, I like all your games a lot. even though im only listing things I think could use fixing and that maybe looks negative, dont take it the wrong way i think its great, and im sure this will turn out great without feedback im just pretending im a playtester
heres a lot of my opinions and feedback
- I wish there was a button to toggle the engines on and off when mining or to slow down... going super fast is fun to get down to the depth that stuff I want at the time starts appearing, but still going that fast when I get there i started just waving my mouse around randomly or leaving it to go completely straight because I couldnt aim for anything specific from going too fast
- right now the progression from 0 to 100 has an abrupt swtich, it goes like... 0%... 3%... 6%... 10%... 12%... suddenly 80%... 100%. once you figure out the auction and your miner gets to a certain point, the game switches from barely affording things to a huge influx of funds and easily unlocking something after every drill for artifacts until you're done. the early game could go a little bit faster, and the late game could get slowed down? idk how youd do that though
- I never really had time to enjoy the "building your miner" aspect of the game until I had already finished it and had a lot of money, because I was selling parts to recover costs and avoid the part price inflation, and you don't spend enough time at different part tiers to really get a miner going before upgrading everything again. (also itd be nice to be able to rearrange the miner parts dragging them) my miner never had more than 5 parts on it until near the very end
- need to be able to see what the future upgrades are + how much they cost before we get there, when I played I opened extra browser tabs of the game to use my limited money to see further ahead so I could plan better (extra tabs so that i could check that but then close them, and save with original tab). same for drill parts, with how prices scale its hard to know if I should sell multiple things to afford the next one up instead and if itll be better or worse.
- was confusing that alloy smelting was a separate upgrade from alloy crafting, especially since I couldn't see future upgrades and didn't know smelting was an upgrade.
- it took me a while to realize you could horizontally scroll with mouse wheel on the menus, ui not clear. scrollbars would help a lot. also took a while to realize that the top of the drill menu lets you switch between 3 drills.
- in late game especially, need a way to set the autosmelter and autocoal employees to only stock and fuel specific furnaces (to block autosmelters from using ores that I want for alloy crafting, and make coal get spent only on specific ores I want to go faster instead of wasting on all
- im sure you have this planned but itd be nice to see the miners total current stats instead of having to count up the inventory space and health and armor from all the different piece
- the gem game was challenging, sometimes frustrating (the good kind), because i think the timings change each time so you cant get into a "rhythm" of when to hit the points even though my instinct is to find the rhythm. I liked that, it very like it would be felt hard to get good at it. Itd be nice if broken gems gave "gem dust" or something though that had a small sell price so losing gems felt less bad.
- some of the upgrade prices feel off, especially the ones in the $ category... Negotiate 1 costs $1000 and increases sell price by 5%. In order to get your money back on that investment, you have to sell $20,000 worth of goods and in the early game thats a lot. ($20k * 1.05 = $21k, at that point the investment is repaid and profit starts) same thing for discount ticket, $2000 for $50 off means 40 auctions before you turn a profit on taking that research
- lot of small things arent clear how they work (idk what reputation does besides unlock auction, I dont know what the reserve tank stat does compared to regular tank, I dont know how battery works or "recharging without moving", I dont think ive seen kamikaze do anything, it should say what the difference between pipe bomb and dynamite and claymore are, it doesnt tell you you get multiple items when you perform a craft (like crafting x1 filer gives 2), doesnt explain how to use items, stuff like that)
- the second time I tried the auction house I understood it, but i dont remember why but the first time i tried I didnt understand at all and wasted $400 for the ticket since it sold for way less than that. I mightve even just tried clicking the gavel first thing and sold for the base price, i dont remember. since theres a cost to learning how to play it (and $400 is a lot until youve played the auction at least once, since most money from auction) I think this part of the game could use a little more guidance for what to do somehow, even though a lot of the rest of the game overall is clear without instructions or tutorials
that ended up being a lot more than i planned to write sorry lol
Wow, thank you for playing and writing this post. You raise a lot of good points, I agree with pretty much all of them.
I'm working on balancing a game (broken auction system make it harder to add new drill part as well). The ability to have 3 drills is added in the last minute (that's why it's not a research) so it look pretty weird and hidden, I'm working on that too.
The progress... yeah it spikes. I playtest it a bit and skip from standard set right to cyber set. I'll try to adjust that, but it would take a lot more playtest to make it right.
Sells price, yep I didn't think too much when setting it. I think I need to create spreadsheet now.
Also button for more control when digging, I'll be adding that too.
Thank you again for playing and writing such a detailed feedback.
i had one other suggestion that's more "feature suggestion" than feedback and i avoid those, but i was still thinking about it so ill mention it. something that might help with a lot of stuff related to "miner upgrades" could be do like you did on your "simpler space" game, and separate into more categories of miner blocks, to encourage designing a ship (like cargo block, magnet block, armor block, insulation block...)
more categories would make your "cost scaling" harder to balance (i think right now it individually scales price per-category for each of the 3 categories?) but maybe it would work if you remove cost scaling completely and instead make each part have a weight stat and make the total ship weight affect fuel consumption, because its heavier? something like that? so theres still a cost penalty for having too much (need a lot more or better fuel storage and ship works less efficient) but it doesn't punish as bad for experimenting
it was fun playing around with designing different ships in simpler space and trying different strategies even just for fun (mine laying builds were fun). in this game at the very end after I had everything unlocked and a ton of money I started to experience the same thing, the bottleneck started to be coal because I couldn't smelt things fast enough so I got to think about which parts would be best to get the most coal as fast as possible on a run
heres the final ship i ended up with (after breaking bank selling things for 51x value from the bug) https://imgur.com/a/odtDxVo
EDIT: for sells price bug, i think you set it right? maybe?? not a spreadsheet balance thing, something in the code... on sell button, "topaz gem" shows $1,000, and "rose glasses" shows $1,250, and when I check your code the function where you set item values it matches there (i see they say 1000 and 1250)
problem is when you actually click sell, jewelry items (glasses, earrings, rings, necklaces) make your money go up by 51x the listed value instead (but it only multiplies the jewelry, topaz still only gives you 1000) i have all the researches and full museum, idk if that matters
Thank you for the replay again! And you're right about the bug. I forgot to set jewelry sell bonus (from museum) as percentage so it multiply by 1 + 50 instead of 1 + 50/100.
It's been a while, I took some time to play the game again starting fresh.
You've improved the game a lot since I last played it, a lot of the rough edges are gone and it's a lot more polished now with ui/controls/overall experience. The core of the game still feels very fun.
I did not play it through to the end this time yet, just to day 63 right now. I haven't used the auction on this run yet due to the cost of entry (though I've unlocked it), but I have paid the $1000 to unlock the garden to explore that game mechanic.
From what I've experienced so far (in my subjective opinion) the game appears to still have the same balance/pacing issues I pointed out a few months ago. I have felt like I'm impoverished for the majority of the run... I'm just scraping by trying to save up enough to do research, and buying more drill parts feels like potentially a waste of money depending on how good the next ones will be.
Future researches still aren't visible, so it's hard to difficult to make a plan for how to spend that money or know if low value researches (like drill speed & tank speed by 5%) end up being worth it thanks to the next ones available, or if it'll take a longer time for that to pay off. (see my previous feedback)
The greenhouse was a bit disappointing, I'm not sure what I expected prior to unlocking but after I did and played around with it to see how it worked and the value I could get out of it right away, I regretted buying it as "early" as I did (somewhere after day 55, I forget when). Maybe it gets better as your drill reaches deeper or you unlock more plants, but it really didn't seem worth investing time into right now with how demanding it is on resources and attention needed, and how strict it is with the harvest timing for the bonuses. I felt encouraged to unlock it when I did because of how many seed resources I had accumulated, and the fact that many of the initially-unlocked craftable items were garden-related, as if the game was telling me that mechanic was a big aspect to the early game. I think I would just get rid of the $1000 entry cost entirely, I don't understand why it has that and everything else is based on days passed.
I thought about it for a while, and I think the reason why I feel like the pacing is so slow, when I could just go on a bunch of runs all in a row since it's not like there's a cost to drilling other than your day counter ticking up, is that "time passes" whenever you drill. Whenever a day passes, contracts tick down and new ones come in, the recycling gets refreshed, the garden grows... I have new resources to sort through from the previous drill run, that I can immediately make use of to smelt down, craft, fulfill contracts, sell things, and make small incremental upgrades to my drill or see how far I am off on research.
So I think the imbalance I'm feeling is that the game is encouraging me to spend more time on each "day" (after each drill run), with having so much available to do, and that I feel that the money I make from each individual drill run (in the early game) is too low, making my progress glacial. I don't know how many other people approached the game in the same way that I did, but if you wanted to improve this for my specific experience with it, a way to go about it rebalancing might be... as an example, if the drill speed was slowed down by 50%, so each individual run took twice as long, but the value of items was doubled. That would make it so per "day"/individual run, a player gets twice as much income potential, but on a per "unit of real time spent" basis (time spent drilling), the rate of income is unchanged. There are other things you could tweak, but that's an example of an approach you could use to rebalance.
Another idea could be to add a time of day system, like morning midday and evening, and have each drill run you do move time forward 1 step instead of jumping to the next day. That way, you're encouraged to only do "between-drill-run chores" once every 3rd run, before the day progresses forward. (So I'd end up getting triple the resources per game day that passes, by going on 3 runs, without needing to tweak the sell prices)
One other note, I see references in the achievements and statistics to a reincarnation feature (and the achievement is labeled "Fresh Start"). I have obviously not found a drillioncoin or gotten to this feature yet but seeing that exists, while experiencing the slow pacing that I am, was almost enough to put me off the game entirely when I saw it. Rebirth features can be implemented well, but it is difficult to have faith in that when the base game has this sort of balancing.
Overall a very solid game still and you're one of my favorite developers on itch, and in spite of the pacing issues I do find myself coming back to the game to push a little further, I just wish it was faster because I feel like I've made no progress by day 63. (only 3 researches, only just unlocked garden, barely feel like I've pushed deeper underground, barely any gems cut, haven't touched auction, and my drill isn't really much different or more interesting than it was when I started on day 1)
edit: another balance and progression thought. even though I haven't done the auction yet since I started playing again, I'm assuming that it's still a lucrative thing to do. But right now I feel deterred from trying, because of the low value items I've have access to (amethyst, clay & iron treasures) and the cost of entry being $400. In the help section, I can see pictures of auctions that go for less than $400, and because it says items value goes down the more you auction them, It feels like I just shouldn't do it yet. (also I think you should check to see if the help section is accurate for that, I think it also said the price of entry is $200 when it's really $400).
I think you should get rid of the cost of entry, and change it to a % based commission fee that the auction takes from every successful auction. Or even a flat fee plus a percentage, just only charge it if the auction is successful and take it out of the winning bid. That would get rid of the barrier to entry, and make me a lot more interested in doing the auction when I unlock it instead of much much later, and having upgrades that reduce the commission fee is a lot more appealing than stuff that reduces a door cost.
Oh wow, thank you for your feedback again. There’re a lot to unpack here.
First you’re right on the mechanics. I think the core concept of digging and getting item can get too repetitive, thus I focus on adding these new “minigames” to do, apparently I didn’t do enough to make it a viable gameplay mechanics (it also very buggy as well), so I’m very sorry about that.
About the greenhouse, I thought of it as an early game extra income, and late game booster. But somehow it failed at being both. Making it unlockable with money is just me trying to add new mechanic. So first I’ll increase yield and selling price for the crop. Also greenhouse tool is now invisible by default and visible once you buy the greenhouse. (I also play around with dynamic price for some item, that might make greenhouse a bit more engaging). Lastly, I add notification when the plant is mature or wilt making bit a bit easier to manage.
The balancing… sigh I adjust drill spec, cost here and there but I still don’t know what I’m doing tbh. I’m playing around with the multiple rounds per day concept as you said, you’ll see in the next update. I make contract a bit more possible in early game so I hope that helps. I increased the amount of ore in the early game just a tiny bit, not sure if that will help.
Also I make all researches visible. I haven’t touch auction system in the next update, but the percentage cut system you propose is an interesting idea.
And about the reincarnation system, those are far in the game and I haven’t put much thought in to that too since I don’t think most player will reach that point. So don’t worry about it for now.
Let me thank you again for leaving such in-depth review of my game. It helps me a lot and I hope I can make your experience better in the future. :)
Ps: sorry for the late reply, I have to read your review while adding it to the game so I can’t reply to it right away.
I am glad that you found my feedback useful. I think you're an excellent developer, and I think the core digging mechanic you have in this game is fun. You seem like you have good design instincts, both for game systems and art + UI, but it's hard for me to tell how much experience someone has sometimes. I have written some advice below that is related to balancing games as a solo developer (not related to this game specifically), in case you're in a place that you might find it useful as well. You might have considered all this already or have your own strategies that work out, if you have just ignore this of course, it's just my perspective on an approach that I find works for me.
Balance is one of the most difficult parts of game development to get right, I think largely because of how time consuming it can be to test things and make iterative improvements, and because of the huge number of different ways you can approach a balance problem. Not to mention that many different approaches to a game can exist, the more complex the systems are. Even games with massive budgets and teams of playtesters and developers (almost all games really) have balance problems on release (sometimes massive glaring ones). Never feel bad about your game having a balance issue you missed, when teams of veterans can't do it either.
I think a valuable thing to do for a solo dev, is to periodically playtest your game from start to finish. Maybe you already are, but I think most solo developers very understandably struggle to find the time for that, and limit their testing to just ensuring that game mechanics work, skipping through gameplay segments with modified saves or resource costs to do targeted feature testing.
Doing a full run of your game periodically helps you spot balance issues and can provide some insight into how to approach them. It gives you a feel of how valuable certain items are over others, where resource crunches can occur, if any upgrades are overpriced or undervalued, if some things are unlocked too soon or too late, things you'd miss when only testing things in isolation.
For some games, depending on the design, it can be harder for a solo developer to test if there's a lot of variables but a "best strategy" that has good balance (but other approaches with poor balance), because it is difficult to pretend to ignore that the "best strategy" path exists for example. For this reason, and because outside feedback is important in general, I think it's be good to ask a few friends and colleagues if they'd be willing to act as game testers every once in a while. It's good to get fresh eyes untainted by playing previous versions as well, so I think it's good to make a mental note of "scheduling" some of your testers to only test later versions. (so that a beta release playtester isn't "tainted" by experience and knowledge from playing the alpha release)
(don't feel pressured to reply to this promptly, or to spend too much time on a reply)
Nicely written. There's definitely something about this game that I want to like - it's a bit reminiscent of some other games I remember playing years ago, but with some unique twists. I keep coming back to try it, and something about the balance and controls keeps getting me. I feel like I just can't get out of the "early game". And I think you described in better detail than I would have everything that I've run up against. Devs on itch should hire you to review their games 😆
dev needs to fix that so people cant hard lock progress (maybe make Lv 1 part free if theres none of that part placed) (right now the hard reset button is broken too)
you can still play though I think
if you open the drill mechanic, at the top of the window it says MECHANIC and an arrow ">" and three underscores _ _ _
you have 3 garages for miner machines, that arrow ">" lets you switch between them. the other two machines should have the body still there
Absolute banger so far! I just downloaded the latest version, however, when launching the game, the window is too large and I am unable to access the resize buttons (needed to change my resolution and then switch back for it to appear). Also, the reset progress button just crashes the game right now.
This doesn't work on any of the research screens. One of the boxes just gets cut off half way so I assume there's more i can't see. This is on the web version.
Also how do you make Tungston Bars? I don't see the option in the Forge, but the auto setting makes them.
great game, one thing tho i dont really like are the dimensions of the screen, i kinda wish it was in landscape mode. because im on a Chromebook and i cant see the full thing on my screen. other than that, its a great game
Thank you for playing. And yor're right the game is 960px height, a bit too much for most 16:9 screen. I'm making it landscape mode now in the next update.
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This game's awesome!
One bug I found is that setting targets for the employees in the forge crashes the game. I'm using google chrome btw.
Ah, I see you patched it! Good work :)
I play on the web version because I'm on Chromebook and I have so much progress that I don't wanna close the tab. Is there a way you could save it???
the game auto saves
you can confirm that your savegame exists by opening a second copy of the game in another tab. it should load your previous progress
Thank you so much 😆
very promising game as always, great ui and art and gameplay
theres a bug right now for me, where the 25% total sell price boost is shown properly on the sell window, but I only get the original price paid to me.
Theres another sell price bug too thats probably worse, where crafted glasses and jewelry gets sold for 51x the base value... so I'm getting $62,500 instead of $1,250 for 1 rose glasses, and $397,800 instead of $7,800 for 1 antanium-diamond necklace. at least it gave me a lot of money to try fun miners that went so fast it looked like they broke the game after I finished everything lol
I unlocked everything and i think right now the balance needs a lot of work.
Im leaving a lot of feedback about it because I this game, I like all your games a lot. even though im only listing things I think could use fixing and that maybe looks negative, dont take it the wrong way i think its great, and im sure this will turn out great without feedback im just pretending im a playtester
heres a lot of my opinions and feedback
- I wish there was a button to toggle the engines on and off when mining or to slow down... going super fast is fun to get down to the depth that stuff I want at the time starts appearing, but still going that fast when I get there i started just waving my mouse around randomly or leaving it to go completely straight because I couldnt aim for anything specific from going too fast
- right now the progression from 0 to 100 has an abrupt swtich, it goes like... 0%... 3%... 6%... 10%... 12%... suddenly 80%... 100%. once you figure out the auction and your miner gets to a certain point, the game switches from barely affording things to a huge influx of funds and easily unlocking something after every drill for artifacts until you're done. the early game could go a little bit faster, and the late game could get slowed down? idk how youd do that though
- I never really had time to enjoy the "building your miner" aspect of the game until I had already finished it and had a lot of money, because I was selling parts to recover costs and avoid the part price inflation, and you don't spend enough time at different part tiers to really get a miner going before upgrading everything again. (also itd be nice to be able to rearrange the miner parts dragging them) my miner never had more than 5 parts on it until near the very end
- need to be able to see what the future upgrades are + how much they cost before we get there, when I played I opened extra browser tabs of the game to use my limited money to see further ahead so I could plan better (extra tabs so that i could check that but then close them, and save with original tab). same for drill parts, with how prices scale its hard to know if I should sell multiple things to afford the next one up instead and if itll be better or worse.
- was confusing that alloy smelting was a separate upgrade from alloy crafting, especially since I couldn't see future upgrades and didn't know smelting was an upgrade.
- it took me a while to realize you could horizontally scroll with mouse wheel on the menus, ui not clear. scrollbars would help a lot. also took a while to realize that the top of the drill menu lets you switch between 3 drills.
- in late game especially, need a way to set the autosmelter and autocoal employees to only stock and fuel specific furnaces (to block autosmelters from using ores that I want for alloy crafting, and make coal get spent only on specific ores I want to go faster instead of wasting on all
- im sure you have this planned but itd be nice to see the miners total current stats instead of having to count up the inventory space and health and armor from all the different piece
- the gem game was challenging, sometimes frustrating (the good kind), because i think the timings change each time so you cant get into a "rhythm" of when to hit the points even though my instinct is to find the rhythm. I liked that, it very like it would be felt hard to get good at it. Itd be nice if broken gems gave "gem dust" or something though that had a small sell price so losing gems felt less bad.
- some of the upgrade prices feel off, especially the ones in the $ category... Negotiate 1 costs $1000 and increases sell price by 5%. In order to get your money back on that investment, you have to sell $20,000 worth of goods and in the early game thats a lot. ($20k * 1.05 = $21k, at that point the investment is repaid and profit starts) same thing for discount ticket, $2000 for $50 off means 40 auctions before you turn a profit on taking that research
- lot of small things arent clear how they work (idk what reputation does besides unlock auction, I dont know what the reserve tank stat does compared to regular tank, I dont know how battery works or "recharging without moving", I dont think ive seen kamikaze do anything, it should say what the difference between pipe bomb and dynamite and claymore are, it doesnt tell you you get multiple items when you perform a craft (like crafting x1 filer gives 2), doesnt explain how to use items, stuff like that)
- the second time I tried the auction house I understood it, but i dont remember why but the first time i tried I didnt understand at all and wasted $400 for the ticket since it sold for way less than that. I mightve even just tried clicking the gavel first thing and sold for the base price, i dont remember. since theres a cost to learning how to play it (and $400 is a lot until youve played the auction at least once, since most money from auction) I think this part of the game could use a little more guidance for what to do somehow, even though a lot of the rest of the game overall is clear without instructions or tutorials
that ended up being a lot more than i planned to write sorry lol
Wow, thank you for playing and writing this post. You raise a lot of good points, I agree with pretty much all of them.
I'm working on balancing a game (broken auction system make it harder to add new drill part as well). The ability to have 3 drills is added in the last minute (that's why it's not a research) so it look pretty weird and hidden, I'm working on that too.
The progress... yeah it spikes. I playtest it a bit and skip from standard set right to cyber set. I'll try to adjust that, but it would take a lot more playtest to make it right.
Sells price, yep I didn't think too much when setting it. I think I need to create spreadsheet now.
Also button for more control when digging, I'll be adding that too.
Thank you again for playing and writing such a detailed feedback.
Im glad you found it helpful :)
i had one other suggestion that's more "feature suggestion" than feedback and i avoid those, but i was still thinking about it so ill mention it. something that might help with a lot of stuff related to "miner upgrades" could be do like you did on your "simpler space" game, and separate into more categories of miner blocks, to encourage designing a ship (like cargo block, magnet block, armor block, insulation block...)
more categories would make your "cost scaling" harder to balance (i think right now it individually scales price per-category for each of the 3 categories?) but maybe it would work if you remove cost scaling completely and instead make each part have a weight stat and make the total ship weight affect fuel consumption, because its heavier? something like that? so theres still a cost penalty for having too much (need a lot more or better fuel storage and ship works less efficient) but it doesn't punish as bad for experimenting
it was fun playing around with designing different ships in simpler space and trying different strategies even just for fun (mine laying builds were fun). in this game at the very end after I had everything unlocked and a ton of money I started to experience the same thing, the bottleneck started to be coal because I couldn't smelt things fast enough so I got to think about which parts would be best to get the most coal as fast as possible on a run
heres the final ship i ended up with (after breaking bank selling things for 51x value from the bug) https://imgur.com/a/odtDxVo
EDIT: for sells price bug, i think you set it right? maybe?? not a spreadsheet balance thing, something in the code... on sell button, "topaz gem" shows $1,000, and "rose glasses" shows $1,250, and when I check your code the function where you set item values it matches there (i see they say 1000 and 1250)
problem is when you actually click sell, jewelry items (glasses, earrings, rings, necklaces) make your money go up by 51x the listed value instead (but it only multiplies the jewelry, topaz still only gives you 1000) i have all the researches and full museum, idk if that matters
Thank you for the replay again! And you're right about the bug. I forgot to set jewelry sell bonus (from museum) as percentage so it multiply by 1 + 50 instead of 1 + 50/100.
It's been a while, I took some time to play the game again starting fresh.
You've improved the game a lot since I last played it, a lot of the rough edges are gone and it's a lot more polished now with ui/controls/overall experience. The core of the game still feels very fun.
I did not play it through to the end this time yet, just to day 63 right now. I haven't used the auction on this run yet due to the cost of entry (though I've unlocked it), but I have paid the $1000 to unlock the garden to explore that game mechanic.
From what I've experienced so far (in my subjective opinion) the game appears to still have the same balance/pacing issues I pointed out a few months ago. I have felt like I'm impoverished for the majority of the run... I'm just scraping by trying to save up enough to do research, and buying more drill parts feels like potentially a waste of money depending on how good the next ones will be.
Future researches still aren't visible, so it's hard to difficult to make a plan for how to spend that money or know if low value researches (like drill speed & tank speed by 5%) end up being worth it thanks to the next ones available, or if it'll take a longer time for that to pay off. (see my previous feedback)
The greenhouse was a bit disappointing, I'm not sure what I expected prior to unlocking but after I did and played around with it to see how it worked and the value I could get out of it right away, I regretted buying it as "early" as I did (somewhere after day 55, I forget when). Maybe it gets better as your drill reaches deeper or you unlock more plants, but it really didn't seem worth investing time into right now with how demanding it is on resources and attention needed, and how strict it is with the harvest timing for the bonuses. I felt encouraged to unlock it when I did because of how many seed resources I had accumulated, and the fact that many of the initially-unlocked craftable items were garden-related, as if the game was telling me that mechanic was a big aspect to the early game. I think I would just get rid of the $1000 entry cost entirely, I don't understand why it has that and everything else is based on days passed.
I thought about it for a while, and I think the reason why I feel like the pacing is so slow, when I could just go on a bunch of runs all in a row since it's not like there's a cost to drilling other than your day counter ticking up, is that "time passes" whenever you drill. Whenever a day passes, contracts tick down and new ones come in, the recycling gets refreshed, the garden grows... I have new resources to sort through from the previous drill run, that I can immediately make use of to smelt down, craft, fulfill contracts, sell things, and make small incremental upgrades to my drill or see how far I am off on research.
So I think the imbalance I'm feeling is that the game is encouraging me to spend more time on each "day" (after each drill run), with having so much available to do, and that I feel that the money I make from each individual drill run (in the early game) is too low, making my progress glacial. I don't know how many other people approached the game in the same way that I did, but if you wanted to improve this for my specific experience with it, a way to go about it rebalancing might be... as an example, if the drill speed was slowed down by 50%, so each individual run took twice as long, but the value of items was doubled. That would make it so per "day"/individual run, a player gets twice as much income potential, but on a per "unit of real time spent" basis (time spent drilling), the rate of income is unchanged. There are other things you could tweak, but that's an example of an approach you could use to rebalance.
Another idea could be to add a time of day system, like morning midday and evening, and have each drill run you do move time forward 1 step instead of jumping to the next day. That way, you're encouraged to only do "between-drill-run chores" once every 3rd run, before the day progresses forward. (So I'd end up getting triple the resources per game day that passes, by going on 3 runs, without needing to tweak the sell prices)
One other note, I see references in the achievements and statistics to a reincarnation feature (and the achievement is labeled "Fresh Start"). I have obviously not found a drillioncoin or gotten to this feature yet but seeing that exists, while experiencing the slow pacing that I am, was almost enough to put me off the game entirely when I saw it. Rebirth features can be implemented well, but it is difficult to have faith in that when the base game has this sort of balancing.
Here are some of my current statistics at day 63:
Maximum depth: 1478 M
Rocks broken: 139
Item collected: 1171
ore collected: 773
gem collected: 6
relic collected: 9
bonus collected: 50
item forged: 62
item crafted: 77
item selled: 244
money from market: $2251
money from contract: $1685
gems cutted: 2
gems broken: 1
item donated: 11
research completed: 3
item recycled: 124
seed planted: 5
and here is my current save file, if you want it:
https://pastebin.com/AH8BxKMX
Overall a very solid game still and you're one of my favorite developers on itch, and in spite of the pacing issues I do find myself coming back to the game to push a little further, I just wish it was faster because I feel like I've made no progress by day 63. (only 3 researches, only just unlocked garden, barely feel like I've pushed deeper underground, barely any gems cut, haven't touched auction, and my drill isn't really much different or more interesting than it was when I started on day 1)
edit:
another balance and progression thought. even though I haven't done the auction yet since I started playing again, I'm assuming that it's still a lucrative thing to do. But right now I feel deterred from trying, because of the low value items I've have access to (amethyst, clay & iron treasures) and the cost of entry being $400. In the help section, I can see pictures of auctions that go for less than $400, and because it says items value goes down the more you auction them, It feels like I just shouldn't do it yet. (also I think you should check to see if the help section is accurate for that, I think it also said the price of entry is $200 when it's really $400).
I think you should get rid of the cost of entry, and change it to a % based commission fee that the auction takes from every successful auction. Or even a flat fee plus a percentage, just only charge it if the auction is successful and take it out of the winning bid. That would get rid of the barrier to entry, and make me a lot more interested in doing the auction when I unlock it instead of much much later, and having upgrades that reduce the commission fee is a lot more appealing than stuff that reduces a door cost.
Oh wow, thank you for your feedback again. There’re a lot to unpack here.
First you’re right on the mechanics. I think the core concept of digging and getting item can get too repetitive, thus I focus on adding these new “minigames” to do, apparently I didn’t do enough to make it a viable gameplay mechanics (it also very buggy as well), so I’m very sorry about that.
About the greenhouse, I thought of it as an early game extra income, and late game booster. But somehow it failed at being both. Making it unlockable with money is just me trying to add new mechanic. So first I’ll increase yield and selling price for the crop. Also greenhouse tool is now invisible by default and visible once you buy the greenhouse. (I also play around with dynamic price for some item, that might make greenhouse a bit more engaging). Lastly, I add notification when the plant is mature or wilt making bit a bit easier to manage.
The balancing… sigh I adjust drill spec, cost here and there but I still don’t know what I’m doing tbh. I’m playing around with the multiple rounds per day concept as you said, you’ll see in the next update. I make contract a bit more possible in early game so I hope that helps. I increased the amount of ore in the early game just a tiny bit, not sure if that will help.
Also I make all researches visible. I haven’t touch auction system in the next update, but the percentage cut system you propose is an interesting idea.
And about the reincarnation system, those are far in the game and I haven’t put much thought in to that too since I don’t think most player will reach that point. So don’t worry about it for now.
Let me thank you again for leaving such in-depth review of my game. It helps me a lot and I hope I can make your experience better in the future. :)
Ps: sorry for the late reply, I have to read your review while adding it to the game so I can’t reply to it right away.
I am glad that you found my feedback useful. I think you're an excellent developer, and I think the core digging mechanic you have in this game is fun. You seem like you have good design instincts, both for game systems and art + UI, but it's hard for me to tell how much experience someone has sometimes. I have written some advice below that is related to balancing games as a solo developer (not related to this game specifically), in case you're in a place that you might find it useful as well. You might have considered all this already or have your own strategies that work out, if you have just ignore this of course, it's just my perspective on an approach that I find works for me.
Balance is one of the most difficult parts of game development to get right, I think largely because of how time consuming it can be to test things and make iterative improvements, and because of the huge number of different ways you can approach a balance problem. Not to mention that many different approaches to a game can exist, the more complex the systems are. Even games with massive budgets and teams of playtesters and developers (almost all games really) have balance problems on release (sometimes massive glaring ones). Never feel bad about your game having a balance issue you missed, when teams of veterans can't do it either.
I think a valuable thing to do for a solo dev, is to periodically playtest your game from start to finish. Maybe you already are, but I think most solo developers very understandably struggle to find the time for that, and limit their testing to just ensuring that game mechanics work, skipping through gameplay segments with modified saves or resource costs to do targeted feature testing.
Doing a full run of your game periodically helps you spot balance issues and can provide some insight into how to approach them. It gives you a feel of how valuable certain items are over others, where resource crunches can occur, if any upgrades are overpriced or undervalued, if some things are unlocked too soon or too late, things you'd miss when only testing things in isolation.
For some games, depending on the design, it can be harder for a solo developer to test if there's a lot of variables but a "best strategy" that has good balance (but other approaches with poor balance), because it is difficult to pretend to ignore that the "best strategy" path exists for example. For this reason, and because outside feedback is important in general, I think it's be good to ask a few friends and colleagues if they'd be willing to act as game testers every once in a while. It's good to get fresh eyes untainted by playing previous versions as well, so I think it's good to make a mental note of "scheduling" some of your testers to only test later versions. (so that a beta release playtester isn't "tainted" by experience and knowledge from playing the alpha release)
(don't feel pressured to reply to this promptly, or to spend too much time on a reply)
Nicely written. There's definitely something about this game that I want to like - it's a bit reminiscent of some other games I remember playing years ago, but with some unique twists. I keep coming back to try it, and something about the balance and controls keeps getting me. I feel like I just can't get out of the "early game". And I think you described in better detail than I would have everything that I've run up against. Devs on itch should hire you to review their games 😆
dev needs to fix that so people cant hard lock progress (maybe make Lv 1 part free if theres none of that part placed) (right now the hard reset button is broken too)
you can still play though I think
if you open the drill mechanic, at the top of the window it says MECHANIC and an arrow ">" and three underscores _ _ _
you have 3 garages for miner machines, that arrow ">" lets you switch between them. the other two machines should have the body still there
Thank you,. I'm sorry about the hard reset bug. That should be fix in the next update.
Absolute banger so far! I just downloaded the latest version, however, when launching the game, the window is too large and I am unable to access the resize buttons (needed to change my resolution and then switch back for it to appear). Also, the reset progress button just crashes the game right now.
Thank you for enjoying it, bug noted I'll be fixing it soon.
this game is damn amazing
Thank you!
How do you scroll the menus?
You can click on the arrow or use mouse wheel.
This doesn't work on any of the research screens. One of the boxes just gets cut off half way so I assume there's more i can't see. This is on the web version.
Also how do you make Tungston Bars? I don't see the option in the Forge, but the auto setting makes them.
great game, one thing tho i dont really like are the dimensions of the screen, i kinda wish it was in landscape mode. because im on a Chromebook and i cant see the full thing on my screen. other than that, its a great game
Thank you for playing. And yor're right the game is 960px height, a bit too much for most 16:9 screen. I'm making it landscape mode now in the next update.
im excited to see it, also, if you ever need a tester or someone to help with the game, just ask me! this game is definitely going places lol.
3MB??
This is rlly amazing, I can't believe a good game like this only fills 3MB of my storage.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy it.
Np a developer like you deserve a donation, sadly I don't have much myself.