Deep Mine Post Mortem

Wow what a fun jam! I had a great time making Deep Mine then playing everyone's games. There were a ton of great high quality submissions. After getting so much feedback, I have compiled a list of things I learned and plan to apply to the next jam:

1. Make a game that is easy to play
- I enjoy challenging games that may take a few tries to get right when I am playing a game but I realize not everyone has these preferences and these kinds of games are very difficult to get right in a game jam. My game for this jam feels relatively easy after hours of continuous practice and despite my attempts to make it easier (no permadeath, moving all the minerals up by a few hundred blocks, increasing ore density, etc) it still ended up being hard enough that a significant percentage of people gave up before seeing all of the gameplay. I think the solution here is to just be more self aware of what gameplay mechanics I might be good at due to practice while making the game so I can adjust the difficulty accordingly.
2. Avoid unintentional or confusing cues
- My game has a bug where mining Ice, Leaves, and a few other worthless materials causes a popup that says "+ (Name of material)". This is because I made the mistake of creating a list of materials that did not take up inventory and left a few common ones off... This minor bug led to a lot of frustration when people filled up a whole inventory full of ice just to find out it is worthless.
3. Guide the player to the optimal strategy
- I wrongly assumed that everyone would find the best strategy of just continuing to dig straight down with occasional cave exploration to get extra resources. As much as I want to avoid having to give a block of text describing the strategy, I should have hinted that as you go deeper, the materials get exponentially more valuable. I noticed many people that played would end up grinding away at the limestone/copper layer and end up getting bored because I failed to communicate to the player that going deeper gave better minerals. If you played motherload or any similar games, it might seem obvious but after watching a significant number of people play my game, I have concluded that it is not obvious and there needs to be some hint here. This leads to my next point: A story with dialog could have helped me sneak in some hints toward better strategy.
4. Have a story if possible
- My game did not have a story this round. Actually almost none of them do as I prefer to focus on making new and interesting mechanics and tend to neglect the equally important story telling aspect of game design. This along with programmer art is probably my biggest weakness and I think adding a very simple story in future games should help me engage the player more fully.
5. Avoid tricky mechanics
- There is a bug that caused wood to catch fire when you drilled it. I thought this was so funny that I ran with it and made it a feature. Burning down the forest accidentally with your drill is hilarious when you have an upgraded hull and coolant to withstand the fire damage. Unfortunately I did not realize that some people would drill the trees first (classic mining game mechanic) and would almost instantly die or at least cause a pretty difficult hazard right by the shop. Another funny mechanic I added was exploding the player into lava when they died. This is fun when you know what lava is and avoid it but it isn't as much fun when you have not been introduced to lava yet and immediately die a second time exploring this new orange substance.
6. Test on multiple browsers
- This is mostly due to how much slower Firefox is than Chrome combined with the fact that my game is a bit of a CPU hog. Delta timing makes up for this but unfortunately due to the custom implementation of the engine, I probably missed one somewhere. (I use matter.js for polygon physics but this requires a lot of integration work with the completely custom sand engine).

I'll try to improve on these for next time! As for the current game, I am stuck between continuing/finishing it in its current form and just giving it a bit of polish then making a completely new terraria-like game which many of you suggested and I agree would seem like a much better use of this engine.

Here is a quick gif demonstrating the tree mining (not a good idea):

Feel free to give it a play!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-mine-1