You are a miner in a cave. You try to collect as much crystals as you can, but the darkness is your enemy. Luckily you have a torch and someone placed fire spots all around, to keep the darkness away. Your torch must stay alive by using the firespots. So collect as much crystals as you can and find the exit before the darkness catches you!!
Coder: Ayoub Gharbi; Noel Widmer; Mark Bubacz
Art: Kevin Meißner
Sound: Benjamin Tausen
How to play: - Light up your torch at the fireplace - Collect crystals - Watch out for your torch not to burn out. (as soon as your fire is off you only have a short amount of time to relight it at a firespot before you loose) - Find the exit - level up with your collected crystals - Next round you face a bigger cave
Update : Added sensitivity sliders to the in-game options. Open ingame options by pressing Esc!
Would be nice to add slider to adjust mouse sensitivity. Can't really move around that well with a mouse. A controller worked better, but still a little slow to look around
Thank you very much for your feedback so far :D We will consider adding configurable input (for mouse sensitivity) after we get some rest. In the meantime it might be a good idea to switch to a controller if your sensitivity is too low. "The mouse works on my machine" as naive developers would say :P
Solid entry. Looks nice, plays nice. Some better cues for when all the crystals are mined would help, since the way their models change is not really consistent and therefore a bit confusing.
Reminds me of the one dwarf game for some reason lmao
Solid game! The scaling difficulty feels great through the levels. Loved the graphics and how the SFX play on the environment, it creates a dense atmosphere that enriches the gameplay.
Overall, it was a great game. But there was a few things that where really annoying: 1st of all, The controller is not very good, 2nd of all,There was no tutorial to explain what I need to do.
Really impressive one, and a frightening too :) I think it would be more immervise if the music didn't stop between level, but maybe that's only me. Congrats to you and your crew !
Great Game. I dont know if you will continue it, but if you do it would be cool to add different types of gems, tool upgrades and stuff. Great Artwork and sound.
Nice game! You really don't wanna be left in the middle of a dark cave without light. The only thing bad I can think about is the lighting from some crystals makes you believe there is a fire nearby. It's not consistent for every crystal pack to have that kind of light, or it is less visible and then you don't make the mistake. So I'd say it's either volontary to trick the player(wich then is good) or you should taint the crystals light red so you can differenciate it from the fire pits light. It's just a detail but it bothered me ingame.
Love the gameplay, visuals and sound. By the way, that's a big team - how did you guys coordinate in this short time? Honest question, because next time I want to work in a team since I always work alone and I can't imagine sharing tasks with that many people in just 2 days.
@splitpainter we just 'met' a few days before and done a little warm up jam (with an other topic) and we just worked really well togehter. Everyone was excited and willing to do the work. So we discussed who will do which task and done it.
Thank for all your feedbacks and keep away from the darkness!
@splitpainter Very good question. What worked for us in "Keep it burning!" was to reduce coordination as much as possible. We didn't had time to come up with a common understanding of a "good structured project" since we only met a few days before the jam. Assign topics to people and let them be the soul editor of that topic. Simplified example of our work: we had 1 visual artist and 1 sound artist which are already well isolated topics. Then we had a character engineer, an achievement/settings/game events engineer and a procedural map generator engineer (the map is procedurally generated even if we ended up using fixed seeds in the final version because random seeds were not fun to play). We seldom had to work in someone elses domain which reduced the number of issues that could have happened.
@lloydcorfex@noel-widmer thanks for the write up. That's quite impressive, just giving around "do the art and we meet later", and then connecting all the dots correctly. Awesome.
@splitpainter If you want to know the tools as well: We used Google docs to work together on a brainstorming right at the start. Then we visualized the idea with an online whiteboard to make the vision clear for everyone. And then we used Git to bring our work together.
Great game. The only complaint I had was that the game was a bit clunky without a very high DPI mouse. The music was great, but it was a little loud and the button in settings doesn't work when you try to turn it off. The graphics are great, and the gameplay was fun and simple.
Nice game, hard a hard time with the mouse sensitivity (even after setting it to max in the settings), but anyway still managed to play ;) Ventured quite far in the mines haha, cool music and mood
@raivk The sensitivity is an interesting problem. Setting it to 30% makes my mouse way too fast. I thought nobody would ever use the 100% setting. Classic. We might increase it even further if it is still too low. Thank you for the feedback :)
Had a lot of problems with mouse sensitivity. even at full settings, it was still a pain to look around. Couldn't really play it like that. Made it to level3, but the gameplay loop doesnt't seem to vary much. Is it just random fire and crystal placements? Just having the darkness as an enemy can get boring after a while :) some more gameplay in that department would've been nice (good old bats or rats, fending them off with the torch!)
The graphics looked nice. Music and Sound were ok, but didn't really fit the mood in my opinion. Especially the music seemed a bit out of place. But still nice that you made an effort to include music.
The core loop couldn't really hook me, so i couldn't motivate me to play more than the first few levels (having the slow mouse issue didn't help either)
The idea was interesting, though the lack of polish definitely makes it feel a bit strange. I did notice post processing on your game (with some bloom coming off the crystals), but I think what it could've especially used was some color grading. If you use ACES (filmic) color grading and changed your shadows to be a bit more blue, it might fit the sort of stylistic look the game was going for, but that's mostly subjective so take that with what you will. I also believe it could've used some particle effects for mining, which you could do by making a particle system, marking the renderer as mesh instead of billboard, then applying either the crystal material or something emissive to add a little extra pop to mining. Speaking of emission, it would've been good to see the crystals glow in the dark a bit more, as they give off a light source but the material itself doesn't appear to be emissive in nature. I did like the texture work on the crystals though. I should also mention the aesthetic feels a bit disjointed at points, with some of the rock textures feeling a bit more realistic than stylized, but I won't mark that against you.
I thought the upgrade mechanic was interesting, and overall it's something I'd consider a game more than a walking sim like some of the other submissions.
This feels like a vertical slice of a larger survival game, which is cool. Good atmosphere, and with upgrades and achievements it has the trappings of a complete project.
For feedback, I'd point to games like Minecraft. Whne you use your pickax, it hits almost immediately. Any delay where the player is waiting to be able to do something feels bad. Also, good games are a series of interesting choices-- give us more choices!
That being said, I think this is more complete and polished than most entries, and has a nice feel.
oof, played it quite a bit. Was really meditative to run around searching for glowing stuff.:D
I find giving feedback always useful (even though this is a jam and time and resources are sparse): Mostly it is just little things, like the torch animation is a tad to slow but the mining animation is ridiculously fast (didn't realize I was swinging a pickax at first). The music worked well, simple, gave the sense of the atmosphere, and didn't started to bother even after a few minutes. But I had the feeling the frequencies clashed a bit with the sfx. At first I wasn't quite sure about the procedural levels. I even died just because there were no fire for ages (maybe it was intended). But after two level it felt nice, how it expanded every time. Giving a sense of progression. Nice would be if there were some unique Assets set in each Level, just to give it a bit more awe.
remember this was a jam, so these a super minor things. I think the biggest improvement would be to make the darkness feel really threatening. At first I didn't even realize it is a real threat until I saw the life bar turn red.
All in all. super solid entry! I lost myself playing it and really liked the idea of the achievements (I'll steal this for my next jam game... hehehehe)
Great game! Loved the concept and when the torch went out, it got stressful with the wind and darkness. My only note is I'd say the animation for lighting the torch was really good but too long. Overall, great game and I'd love to explore more of the caves and mine more!
The concept is there and the mood is nice and calm. It's not the most creative game unfortunately, I've played a lot of torch games this jam. The achievements was a nice touch.
Maybe a creature or two that lurks in the dark, or something fun in between.
Would've been nice to see a little bit more from a team this big.
Keep at it and I'm sure with a few additional features this game can be a lot of fun to play.
Overall this was a very nice entry! I don't have too much to complain. Gathering the crystals is a bit awkward sometimes. You think you get only one out but get 4, then the next time you think you'll get all and get none. The only other thing that could be detrimental is that it gets samey very fast. The first three level were really exciting, but my curiousity sated and so the fourth level I didn't even care whether the torch runs out.
On a completely different note: The whole game through I thought how cool this would be in VR :D
At first I tried to just speedran on one charge of the torch. On the first levels, it worked. But then, when the caves became more complicated, I began to lose. Thanks for the game, the atmosphere is incredible!
The mood in this game is really great. I liked your approach to lights in the world :).
Mouse felt too sensitive to me - even when I lowered my sensitivity down to 1800 dpi. But then I discovered the sensitivity slider you added and all was well :). I also experienced some jumpiness, for a lack of a better word, not exactly lag, but looking around didn't feel smooth.
At the lowest sensitivity the camera still jittered around every time I tried to move. It was unplayable, so I didn't rate it. Can't find the sensitivity slider they are talking about above.
Comments65
Reminds me of the one dwarf game for some reason lmao
You will be able to adjust your sensitivity in the next update ^^
We didn't find time to do a tutorial properly so please check the "How to play" section in the description :)
We are working to fix the sensitivity problem so it would solve the controller problem :)
Now you can adjust the camera sensitivity in the in-game options (Escape to open) ;)
The only thing bad I can think about is the lighting from some crystals makes you believe there is a fire nearby. It's not consistent for every crystal pack to have that kind of light, or it is less visible and then you don't make the mistake. So I'd say it's either volontary to trick the player(wich then is good) or you should taint the crystals light red so you can differenciate it from the fire pits light. It's just a detail but it bothered me ingame.
Thank for all your feedbacks and keep away from the darkness!
👍nice game
The graphics looked nice. Music and Sound were ok, but didn't really fit the mood in my opinion. Especially the music seemed a bit out of place. But still nice that you made an effort to include music.
The core loop couldn't really hook me, so i couldn't motivate me to play more than the first few levels (having the slow mouse issue didn't help either)
I thought the upgrade mechanic was interesting, and overall it's something I'd consider a game more than a walking sim like some of the other submissions.
For feedback, I'd point to games like Minecraft. Whne you use your pickax, it hits almost immediately. Any delay where the player is waiting to be able to do something feels bad. Also, good games are a series of interesting choices-- give us more choices!
That being said, I think this is more complete and polished than most entries, and has a nice feel.
I find giving feedback always useful (even though this is a jam and time and resources are sparse):
Mostly it is just little things, like the torch animation is a tad to slow but the mining animation is ridiculously fast (didn't realize I was swinging a pickax at first).
The music worked well, simple, gave the sense of the atmosphere, and didn't started to bother even after a few minutes. But I had the feeling the frequencies clashed a bit with the sfx.
At first I wasn't quite sure about the procedural levels. I even died just because there were no fire for ages (maybe it was intended). But after two level it felt nice, how it expanded every time. Giving a sense of progression. Nice would be if there were some unique Assets set in each Level, just to give it a bit more awe.
remember this was a jam, so these a super minor things. I think the biggest improvement would be to make the darkness feel really threatening. At first I didn't even realize it is a real threat until I saw the life bar turn red.
All in all. super solid entry! I lost myself playing it and really liked the idea of the achievements (I'll steal this for my next jam game... hehehehe)
:)
My only note is I'd say the animation for lighting the torch was really good but too long.
Overall, great game and I'd love to explore more of the caves and mine more!
Little bit laggy on my computer though but then again my PC is 12 years old
It's not the most creative game unfortunately, I've played a lot of torch games this jam.
The achievements was a nice touch.
Maybe a creature or two that lurks in the dark, or something fun in between.
Would've been nice to see a little bit more from a team this big.
Keep at it and I'm sure with a few additional features this game can be a lot of fun to play.
Gathering the crystals is a bit awkward sometimes. You think you get only one out but get 4, then the next time you think you'll get all and get none.
The only other thing that could be detrimental is that it gets samey very fast. The first three level were really exciting, but my curiousity sated and so the fourth level I didn't even care whether the torch runs out.
On a completely different note: The whole game through I thought how cool this would be in VR :D
Mouse felt too sensitive to me - even when I lowered my sensitivity down to 1800 dpi. But then I discovered the sensitivity slider you added and all was well :). I also experienced some jumpiness, for a lack of a better word, not exactly lag, but looking around didn't feel smooth.