Enter the mines

The Game

`Enter the mine` is a game that lets you experience the dream job of a miner. Every miner knows that a flashlight is essential. You can't go without one! It reassuring light will encourage you to venture deeper into the depths. Hop onto your cart to roll through the tunnels as you explore, gathering as many minerals as you can!

Hurry up! You have 3 days to meet your quota!

Important notice

1.1 Post-jam version available
- bumped the lighting up a tiny bit
- rebalanced monster as they were a bit too fast on first couple playthoughs
- fix a bug preventing you from carrying money over into the next day
- fix a bug where player would get stuck in the minecart

I kept the embeded version on LDJam as 1.0 with all the flaws but i updated the itch.io page to use latest version

while the game runs directly in the embedded LDJam player, it doesn't run *well* and has many mouse issues. For the best experience, play on desktop. If this is impossible (or you don't want to), play the itch version in the links below as itch allows to play full screen and helps massively with the mouse problems (still not perfect tho). lighting is the bigger issue though, the game is much darker in web format than it is on windows.

Controls

WASD: to move

Space: to jump (always better to jump while screaming ;) make it more dramatic)

Shift: to run ... untils you run out of breath

Left click: interact with cart or grab mineral

E: toggle flashlight

Dev insights (ownedstuff)

This was a very fun and laid back jam. I partenered with @MrBamboo again for this one! I wanted to try my hand at another horror game as i had a lot of fun the first time i did this in a previous jam. I don't think the theme was the best it could have been for a horror game as the term 'tiny' kind of implies 'harmless' but i was dead set in making it horror.

From the theme, the word creature really jumped at me and gave me the inspiration to go in a direction that will be very familiar to those who have played Lethal Company. The goal was to have multiple little creatures that would all have their own AI and behaviours. In typical jam fashion, scope was massively cut and we ended up with a single creature with a pretty simple AI. You get 3 days to go in, grab materials and crush enough of them to meet the quota.

This was the first time i used Godot to do 3D and it was a challenge. I'm pretty used to Godot by now but 3D is a whole other thing. i wanted to get set up with a map early on so i looked for a plugin that would and found Cyclops Level Builder. It's pretty intuitive to use and definitely helped to make basic geometry for the map but it's got serious limitations and bugs that make it harder to use than i would have like. It cannot for example make concave shapes so getting walls that curve inwards required multiple polygons and it would frequently crash Godot when making selections so saving often was key.

While building the level i found out about Material Maker and this was a godsend! All textures in the game are picked from their assets collection and were slightly tweaked in different ways to convert them to low-res and adapt them as needed. I didn't feel like my 3D modeling and texturing skills/tools were good enough to pull of a truck so i just downloaded one here to save time.

When it came to making the creatures, MrBamboo made a prototype of the Skitter (that's what it's called) with very complex code for navigating the mine and looking for the player. It worked but it would go through walls and was very hard to update as the map became larger. So i found another package called BehaviourToolkit that helped with making a FSM (Finite State Machine) so i ported MrBamboo's code to this new system and used Godot's NavMeshes for pathfinding making it easy to the add a couple more skitters as drop in addition to the game.

From the start, i knew sound design was very important as horror is 90% conveyed through sound. I wanted an atmosphere that was very bassy and heavy in the mine while lighter outside. I recorded myself blowing into my microphone and pitch shifted the result down a bunch to have a background noise that was very bassy but also noisy as in not constant. I then layered a bunch more versions of me blowing into the mic with different effects like reverb and EQs and we ended up with what's in the game.

Sound design is actually so much fun, a couple more example are the skittering sound was made from a pen tapping on a pillow, the footsteps were actually me walking in gravel, the outside sound is just.. the outside sound right in front of my house and the shredder is MrBamboo's blender with ice in it!

So all in all this was an amazing experience! The visuals are pretty terrible but we did what we could with the tools we had as neither of us does 3D modeling.

Hint and tips

Use your flashlight to enter the mine

Push your cart on the rail to gather items and bring them back

Explore mine with only your memory to remember the exit path

Avoid to meet tiny creatures that will kill you in 1 hit

Meet the quota in 3 days

Extract valuable mineral from mine

Bing back minerals to the shredder

Shred minerals to get money to reach quota

See if you reach quota after shredding minerals

Exit the area when you thing it's time to go or when you reached quota