The life of a Dredger can be one filled WITH RICHES... AND PERIL...
Go deep sea diving to find your riches!
But be wary...
- Try not to disturb the KRAKEN or you are in for a FIGHT!
- If you find yourself in a fight, use discovered gems to help you.
[ HINTS ]
- Make sure to flag potential KRAKEN TILES if you don't want to trigger an unwanted 4+ battle!
- Unused GEMS are used as BONUS points to your score each round!
- Flagged KRAKEN tiles earns bonus points!
NEW MUSIC HAS BEEN ADDED
DOWNLOAD A TINY GAME MANUAL YOU CAN PRINT OUT
How rich can you become...
[ CONTROLS ]
[ Cursor keys / D-Pad ] - Movement
[ X ] - Open tile
[ O/Z ] - Plant flag
NEW ABILITY!!!
You can now HEAL when on the tile grid by pressing [ X + O ] together!
Button swapping is available
NOTES:
This is my first full game. I am still new to game dev as well as coding.
I am quite proud of this game even though it is a simple concept.
There are many ways I could improve it on the code as well as gameplay.
I am not sure if I will continue developing this but if there are any bugs please do let me know.
[ UPDATE 1.1 ]
- Realised the scoring was not functional!
[ UPDATE 1.2 ]
- Player won't trigger a mine when opening your first tile. There is still a chance of opening your first tile and triggering a 4+ battle however.
- Added sound effects to HEAL and button selection in the battle screen
[ UPDATE 1.3 ]
- Kraken has a chance of missing you when attacking in battle.
- Player was hit (visually, no HP was taken off) when beating a kraken. This has been fixed. The kraken now leaves without (visually) hitting the player.
- Added some particle effects to the battle.
[ UPDATE 1.4 ]
- The TUTORIAL button now WORKS!!
[ UPDATE 1.5 ]
- Previously the end of the tutorial just reset the game. Now it goes straight into gameplay.
- More particle effects
- Trying to balance the enemy missing you when attacking
[ UPDATE 1.6 ]
- Done a bit of token farming for further implementations
- Player won't trigger a battle with the Kraken on his first go at opening tiles if they hit a 4+ warning tile within the first 9 tiles.
[ UPDATE 1.7 ]
- You can now heal when on the tile grid by pressing X + O (if you have heal gems!)
- Fixed the bug where opening the last set of tiles could trigger a 4+ battle.
- Added a touch more juice!
[ UPDATE 1.8 ]
- I have added 2 new tracks.
[ UPDATE 1.9 ]
- I fixed the number overflow when scoring more than 32k. You can now get a huge high score!
- Fixed the version numbering
- Tweaked the music tracks
Haha... I guess it was due @pablonichols!
But I have to admit I didn't think I would finish it. I started this 4 months ago while diving season was still on the go. There were lots of long breaks between sessions of work on the game.
I have to thank the guys from the Lazydevs discord for really helping me get my ideas down and functional. I learnt a lot from their help as well. (Big thanks to - thego, Heracleum, SmellyFishstiks and Washburnello)
Haven't played yet, but just by looking at the visuals its enough. I will definitely play it, Can't wait to see more.
very neat little minesweeper-like! you should probably make it so you won't get a kraken the first tile you click on since that's what has ended all of my runs so far
@cheesemug
Thank you! I hope you do enjoy it.
@philaletheist
Thanks! I have fixed that bug you mentioned. I will admit it was brought to my attention before and it slipped my mind to fix it. Hopefully it works better now.
What makes gems appear? After the first round it seems I don't ever get any.
Finding diamonds in the ocean is a real life RNG (random numbers game) so I tried to give it the same feeling in the game. You will have times where there aren't any gems.
A very polished minesweeper game! I like the addition of the Kraken battles.
A couple of suggestions...
Firstly, the first click on an new level should never encounter the Kraken. Minesweeper games usually generate the level when the user clicks for the first time to ensure that they don't get penalised when they have no information at all about the location of mines.
Secondly, the player can lose a lot of health in one level, and then encounter the Kraken at the start of the next level and be beaten right away, because they don't have any gems to use for healing. It would be good if the player could use gems for healing after beating the Kraken, or between levels choose to spend gems for healing instead of score.
@dredds
Thank you for trying the game and I appreciate the feedback!
1) Yeah I was warned about having trigger tiles from the first opening. This is something I will have to look into.
2) Restoring health between battles/levels is an interesting idea! I like it! I am going to play around with this idea. Thanks!
Brilliant!
Also the graphics and the subtile dramatic music loop.
Big Like from my side!
this is one of my favorite games on pico8 right now. what a fresh take on minesweeper.
things i love:
gnarly music
interactive tutorial
heavy animations
rpg combat (lost my mind when this came up. so cool.)
moving target to show who the move will hit. really cute ui.
when gems spill out of a destroyed block
spending gems to heal. clever take on the rewards.
things i didn't love:
kraken hp bar at 0 still looks a little filled
on lvl 2 i started a level by fighting kraken before i'd placed anything. didn't understand why, but almost died :(
music started to feel a little repetitive. would've appreciated a b-section.
@ohhcurtains
This is an amazing comment to read! You've made my day!
I am busy with trying to make more music. I have no background in music so please forgive my slack on getting new music in the game but I do promise to try and add more ;-)
With regard to the having to fight the Kraken on a new level without opening any tiles. I think I know what happened there. I think you had opened a 4+ tile at the same time of opening the last tiles of the level.
This is something I will have to fix! Thank you for letting me know! I have a background in art but not code. So I promise to work on that as well!
I'm currently travelling at the moment but do plan of having some new songs added to the game so it doesn't become monotonous quickly while playing. I am also wondering whether I should include a "quit and save" feature? The game is an endless loop if you're good but never saves your high score until you die...
A very nice game with unlimited replay value! I'm definitely starring it.
I'm also going to make a video, so do you have any links like Itch.io or any socials you would want to be credited with? There's nothing linked to your Lexaloffle profile at the moment.
I've played some more and found a couple minor things.
- It seems that the score overflows around 32k points.
- The title screen says it's version 1.7 while it's supposed to say 1.8.
@lastofavari
Wow I don't think anyone has played it that long! Thank you for letting me know. I obviously hit the number overflow with the high score. I will look into fixing that. I think there is a way to store a higher value. I am still learning so please give me some time to try and fix it.
You are correct on the version number as well. I was pushing to finish the game and overlooked some things. Thanks!
Regarding large score values. You can store 32 bits of score if you add 0x0.0001 per point, instead of 0x1. Then you need to convert to a decimal string when you display it.
I have created a downloadable PDF of a tiny game manual for Gemstone Dredging. I have some things to tweak and then I'll upload the file. Here's a sneak peak...
Man, this is really fun. I think the "radius" to your click is a great spin on the minesweeper formula so that you don't unlock the whole level at once. The turn based fights are really polished too. I need to play more to get into it but I love it so far. Great game for my handheld.
@pabloblancogames
I am really happy you are enjoying the game. Thank you for letting me know!
Looks very good, plays nice, some unavoidable kraken encounters when doing no minesweeper mistakes, but the gem drop and life is high enough that it doesn't seem to matter much. Main problem is that the difficulty curve is flat. After 20 or so levels, you're not challenged any more than at the start, and the only motivator to continue is the score, witch is meaningless if you can play forever. Maybe have scrolling and grid size going up for example, or maybe getting damage over time ?
@RealShadowCaster
You are completely correct in saying there isn't much of a challenge after awhile. I have gotten some great feedback and plan to work on the game some more when work allows it. I'm also toying with the idea of porting it to Picotron as well so I have less worried about restrictions. Being new to code and game development Pico-8s limitations is amazing but it really becomes tricky when you start to hit that limit and your knowledge is limited as well. I really appreciate that you played it though and I look forward to seeing if I'm able to improve into the point of being a full game.
@thesailor, if you are looking for tokens, there's a very juicy low hanging fruit : each time you have a big series of calls of the same function that use only numbers or string literals and you don't use the return values, you can factorize all the calls into a single 2 tokens call :
-- returns a multi call function
function multi(f)
return
function(s)
local a=split(s,"\n")
local i
for i=1,#a do
f(unpack(split(a[i])))
end
end
end
--in init
multi_circfill=multi(circfill)
multi_rectfill=multi(rectfill)
multi_line=multi(line)
multi_sspr=multi(sspr)
multi_pset=multi(pset)
multi_rrect=multi(rrect)
-- and in your code, instead of a series of calls
multi_circfill
[[5,60,6,7
14,60,8,7
25,60,4,7
65,60,4,7
75,60,8,7
83,60,6,7
90,60,6,7
98,60,4,7
102,60,4,7
110,60,8,7
120,60,8,7]] |
There's plenty of other tricks, but this one should give you significant breathing room.
Warning, as written, you can't use the booleans for sspr for example.
If you want to, you'll have to modify the multi function to it convert certain chosen string values to booleans or nil for example.
EDIT : added local i to the code, otherwise the global i would be modified.
@thesailor ,
Probable unintended behaviour : you can finish a level and trigger a fight at the same time. When that happens, you win the level first, and the battle occurs at the start of next level, so you can't use the gems you had on hand when triggering the battle.
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