It's a hole digging sort of game now. I have a few ideas for where this could go; need to play around with it
#The Shovelling Hour
quick peak
quick peak
Wake Up it's Time to Dig Some Holes
thorny shadow
Ooooo ok ok ok yea
quick peak
tried a thing where your shovel bounces you back from walls which makes movement awkward but has interesting puzzle potential. Not sure I want to go in this direction though, feels too stephen's sausage roll-y
thorny shadow
Hmmm it’s very tactile and satisfying ….but maybe not clear yet what that would GIVE to the level design process? Unless maybe some walls can be cracked by shoveling multiple times or something
Honestly It looks like there’s already some fun directional complexity in the shovel facing the way of your last move that I can imagine contributing a lot to level design already…
Like if you wanna be able to dig at this tile you have to figure out how to get at it the right way or whatever
quick peak
yeah that's true, there's some kinda fun fiddlyness already
the wall bounce thing would make the game more about navigation since it's harder to get right up to walls, could make it a challenge to get through a corridor etc. and maybe there could be a way you could move things with the shovel to set up a bounce (doesn't work right now because the things you can shovel don't bounce you)
thorny shadow
Oooh I see I see so you don’t have to press dig, you just would bounce off if you tried to face the wall
thorny shadow
Idk that might mesh well w the other fiddly thing ! Might just need to doodle a quarter of a level and see if it’s the Right Kind of Fiddly
Cuz certain level design shapes would be Right Out but others might be interesting …. Like I can imagine you have to maybe find a weak part of wall to dig so you can shortcut thru a wall because you can’t go around a tight corner ….
Def a chance it would be like ARGH WHY ARE THESE WALLS SO HOSTILE tooo but
I bet you could quickly map what level shapes are good and bad and see what that provided tho
quick peak
yeah, good idea
thorny shadow
It might be fun to have a tile that is Good To Whang too
quick peak
one of my original ideas was a different sort of left field mechanic that would come in later in the game and take the player by surprise, but I'm thinking it might be too complicated to implement to be "easy". definitely not obvious though
thorny shadow
Oooo thats good tho, cuz sometimes it just takes a day of background stewing to see the easier implementation
but yea it feels like if you have two verbs “bump” and “dig” then the trick is like … ok is all bumping bad or is some bumping good… is all digging good or is some digging bad …
nocturne storm
It reminds me of the shovel in Animal Crossing where you can dig up the ground to find stuff but also bump into the rocks to sometimes have treasure come out of the rocks. I’ve been wanting to do a riff on Heiankyo Alien at some point but that game has you dig holes to create traps for enemies to fall into. Lots of possibilities with a shovel!
quick peak
working on refining interactions, animations and UI a bit. I've been putting off doing level design for whatever reason but I think I need to do that now
thorny shadow
Very satisfying !! Stacking up inventory looks great too
quick peak
started doodling some levels and it seems like there's definitely a game here. a sort of weird obtuse game, but that's just the direction I'm going in I think
Also managed to implement a couple more interactions (some tiles can be bounced into and broken, which is fun).
And I got proper undo working, in a pretty memory-efficient way to the point that I don't think a normal player will ever exhaust all the undo steps (but I'm deleting the oldest ones when memory is nearly full just to be safe). Implementing undo was not easy but it will make designing the rest of the game easier.
got started on some sfx too, and it's feeling like a real actual game. Hopefully I can get it to a good point where it feels complete-ish in the week remaining
enjoying that a lot of the design decisions have been me playing around and being like "wouldn't it be weird if this happened when I did this? That doesn't work does it?" and just trying it out and usually going with it
it might end up a little confusing but there's no way it will be as confusing as my last jam game (https://sparsegamedev.itch.io/the-seed-wanderer)
quick peak
right now I'm prototyping puzzles as single rooms but I'd like to be able to have the whole thing be interconnected. So I guess make a bunch of little puzzles and see how I can squish them together
might end up situations where player isn't sure if they messed up a while back or if there's just something to their current puzzle they haven't figured out, but maybe it's just that kind of game (don't really have time for a bunch of rounds of playtesting)
thorny shadow
mmmm yea that was scary to think about on Lil Kobold recently... i ended up feeling like you can always linearize a set of puzzles that are more dependent that way, and/or "relax" some puzzles requirements (either by allowing an alternate solution or adding "spare" resources nearby).... ultimately not as scary as i thought it was going to be (altho i was glad i was thinking about those kinds of potential issues!)
quick peak
Thinking of calling the game "The Shovelling Hour"
torn hill
It should not let you win until time() >= 3600
quick peak
still have lots of puzzles to make but I've started filling out the environment and thinking about the goal / ending
torn hill
I love Mysterious Hole ending
quick peak
did a bit of playtesting last night (with my partner who doesn't really like puzzle games) and as expected my initial puzzles are too hard & the game's a bit confusing... not gonna have a lot of time to work on it before the deadline but I'll try to put together something. can hopefully pad out what I have a bit to try to even out the learning curve and maybe simplify / scale things down a little
thorny shadow
ooooh interesting... .yea might need to prepend some lighter bits....
sorry i keep getting distracted by the mesmerizing water effect...
torn hill
So when I started your game I was like
"oh that font looks familiar it looks like that pico 8 game Into Ruins that I played recently"
And now I understand you made that :P
Very cool.
quick peak
yeah! It's nice to have stuff like that you can reuse
quick peak
The Shovelling Hour
I think there are some small bugs related to hitting diagonals on the dpad. Gonna try to fix that up during my son's nap today.
Also might try to remove the diagonals from the dpad on mobile so it's easier to control, like I did for into ruins
thorny shadow
oh yea diagonal knockouts should be easy and cut off a bunch of weirdness
quick peak
I thought I was processing the hori / vert inputs separately but I messed it up for the bounces
should be fixed up now
quick peak
Ok a bit more bug fixing & I've updated the capsule / screenshots / label image.
Also it's on the BBS now: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=154260
(itch link for posterity: https://sparsegamedev.itch.io/the-shovelling-hour)
thorny lotus
I was trying out this ont but I can't really figure out what I'm supposed to do