Dwarf Deep
A game about underwater mining - built solo in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 48, and breaking all my usual jam rules.
The theme for the jam was “Deeper and Deeper” so my first thought was of mining, and my second thought was of diving. I decided to just do both.
I used Unity’s built in tile system to get started quickly, then built my own set of tools and features on top of that to enable the digging and flooding mechanics I needed.
I’m personally really proud of my progress in creating pixel art and sound effects for this game, as everything in the game was created by me. I particularly enjoyed experimenting with recording my own foley effects for satisfying gameplay feedback.
My core rule for game jams for years has been “don’t do upgrade systems”. Implementing the effects of basic speed/productivity multipliers always feels easy, but getting the UI and the gameplay balance right is so much more work that it seems. For this game, I needed a reason for the player to want to mine, which meant I needed something to spend resources on. This ended up being upgrades.
I’d like to say first that my rule still holds, the UI and balance for upgrades is way more work than it seems. Even though I’m pretty happy with how the UI ended up, in the initial jam release of Dwarf Deep, there was a certain combination of upgrades that made the player in my swimming game essentially allergic to water. Any contact with the surface would rapidly drain the air tank. I had to do an emergency patch to remove an upgrade to prevent this.
This game really couldn’t work without the upgrades, so the fact that all this time was spent on that instead of making the player controller feel better (time that would definitely have improved the game as a whole) was ultimately worth it I think.
In future I’m thinking of “no upgrades” as less of a rule, and more of a guideline.