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This game is inspired by NuSan's brilliant Flooded Caves, it is a fan game :)
It is your job to save people who went cave diving from drowning! Water is entering the caves, use your drill to carve tunnels to redirect the flow of water and try to save as many people as you can.
Controls:
X or V or Left Mouse Button to carve
Arrows or Mouse to move the cursor
The difficulty still needs some finetuning, do let me know how you like it! The Cave generation is based on GPT`s idea of a Noise Algorithm, I might clean it up in the future cause it was useful to me.
Update 6.1.24
- Updated the menu to reflect the inspiration by Flooded Caves by NuSan
- renamed "Easy" to "Learning Difficulty" and made it even easier and quicker
- added rescue animation and sound
- some bugfixes
- a nod to @NuSan in the game's menu
- added a "perfect win" indicator when you manage to save everybody
Hi @taxicomics. I am a big fan of the original and was very interested to see what you've done with it. I'll scribble down my thoughts on each of the gameplay changes:
- The concept of rain rather than a "tap". I love it!! It makes the game much more challenging as you are immediately having to cater for different sides of the screen. A really brilliant addition which takes this version further than just a re-skinning of the original. To me, this makes the game enough to stand on its own.
- "Exploding people" - how odd! So when someone drowns, they now explode! I guess this helps a bit and makes a death less punishing, but I think a good aspect of the original is that a drowned failure remains on the screen reminding you of your inability to save them. I miss that from your version.
- The digging - there's something about the digging that seems to "stick" a bit. I am having trouble explaining it, but by the time someone is drowning, it feels like there's very little I can do about it. In the original I'd dig under them to make them drop (and reset their drowning timer), but it feels like this is not so possible. Is attempting to dig when you have no energy left punishing in some way and I should pause digging till some has recovered?
- I like your difficulty levels but (like you said) some fine tuning is necessary. Easy is too easy and nightmare rain feels impossible.
- In the original felt like the waters were rising on the people. In this it feels like the individuals are all at the end of a tunnel so when its raining hard there isn't much opportunity to create caverns beneath them and have a break. Was this a concious design decision?
- No escape animation? In the original it was nice to see the people rise to freedom. Any plans to add it or at least some form of recognition that they have escaped? Currently the people just seem to disappear.
I hope my comments don't come across as too negative. I really enjoyed playing your version and am glad that it exists. I also hope that you continue tweaking it. Good luck!
Thank you so much for your feedback! That was really helpful. I just updated the game, here is what I've changed.
- The "easy" difficulty has been renamed to "learning difficulty"
- An escape animation has been added(great idea, thanks for that!)
- some bugfixes
- a nod to @NuSan in the game's menu
- added a "perfect win" indicator when you manage to save everybody
I would also like to address the rest of the feedback.
- I'm happy that you enjoyed the "rain" mode! It is very chaotic and I am happy that it feels different. Do note that this game is not a reskin, I started from scratch and I am still not sure how similar our approaches are.
- The people still explode. I know that it does not really make sense, but I like the added chaos. Sometimes it helps the player, sometimes it ruins the players plans. I love that.
- The digging does feel weird sometimes, mostly when played with the mouse. Whenever you move your mouse quickly the game struggles to keep up. There is a fix, but I was too lazy implement it because I mostly play with buttons.
And when you're out of carving power your cursor slowly carves whenever enough energy is regained, starting from -1,-1 and going to 1,1. - I intentionally put the people at the end of tunnels to increase the difficulty. Every decision comes with perks and disadvantages, but I like the feel of this.
- I think a nightmare difficulty should truly feel impossible. I have beaten it ONCE so far :D
Thank you so much for your great feedback :)
I really like your improvements - I haven't beaten nightmare rain. Yet...
Very nice, and more challenging than the original.
About strategy :
up until hard, you can dig everywhere needed, join some caves when you have time, save people from lowest to highest with the occasional higher flooded guy and win flawlessly.
This doesn't work in nightmare rain, the overall water level rises too fast for that. What you need to do is look at the map and restart if it's not looking good. The idea is to have a smaller half where you'll spend most of the digging, and a bigger half where you'll spend most of the savings first. As soon as possible when you can deal with extra water intake, you should slant the top middle of the map so that most of the water goes on the biggest half, and have that side fully saved and filled to the top.
If you reached that point without casualty, the game is usually won. Save from bottom to top and join remaining caves for extra time.
I really like this version a lot. If it was possible to have procedurally generated levels, that would the icing on the cake. Anyway, I made a video for this here:
Sorry for the late reply, I'm focused on another gamedesign project outside of our Pico8 sphere(but I do miss its simplicity a lot).
@tinysorcerer congrats! Very nicely done :) And the generated level was not even in your favor.
@inphanta Thank you for making a video, I appreciate that immensely! Glad you had fun. As I said in my comment on your video the levels are in fact procedurally generated at runtime, but I'm proud that you thought they weren't.
Overall I am very happy that you enjoyed my changes. I'm looking forward to any new ideas popping up.
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