Payback Pit

Hmm... this really reminds me of another game, also in 3D, but I just can’t remember the name... Still, this one looks quite interesting, especially with the mining and item interaction mechanics. I’ll try to explore it more and come back with a more detailed review. Either way – huge thanks for the game! Great job :)

It's amazing that you build everything from scratch. It's a lot of work. I like this low poly art stye.

Turning that crank is just so much fun. Spent more time than initially planned to reach that 2000 mark. In the end my own greed killed me as I always tried to get that bucket down again while enemies were already approaching ^^

Love the atmosphere and collecting all the the minerals was a lot of fun!
The gun play felt great as well altough I thing you could increase the frequency of enemy spawns a bit

Really cool game and one I've had bookmarked to play all day, glad I finally got around to it. Didn't manage to get to 2000 since I glitched myself into the bucket and got swarmed, which honestly feels pretty fitting given how I kept going back for more even when there were enemies around. Solid entry for the jam!

I enjoyed the graphics and audio quite a bit. I think it would be cool if the enemies dropped something when they died. Perhaps a different sort of resource?

One thing I noticed when selling ore, I could never get all my ore numbers to zero. There was always one pesky ore sitting in my inventory, no matter how many times I pressed E. XD

@matthewdrake @2009yasha2009 @min-pan @fernofai @bene-labs

We are really happy that you all enjoyed playing our game!
As you have noticed, there are a few minor UI and perhaps collision bugs that we weren't able to fix in time, some values don't update when they should.
There will always be 1 ore left in your inventory (but it's just an illusion, don't trust it) and the gemstone ui also just updates occasionally ;)

Hope you still have a good time!

@trevor-lentz The enemies do actually drop a ressource! It's the red gemstone points under your money. If you have 10 of them, you can press E onto the (slightly too small) sign next to the pulley and increase the ore-value of your next pull significantly :)

I like the overall idea of the mining using the pulley system. It was hard to figure out what I was doing at first. The pause menu instructions helped but having a little box that explains things and what you're trying to do at the beginning would be a better start on that side of things.

The combat was decent - I liked the visuals for the enemies. The two enemies that I experienced felt fairly similar and I could kite both of them using melee attacks to not take any damage.
Adding in some ranged enemies would really switch things up.

Having some tooltips on the interactables would help with making it 100% clear what you're buying before you spend on something. Having text show up when you're near an interactable prompting you (Press E to Lower) would help with making interactions easier to understand.

All of the interactions themselves felt pretty solid. Fun game!

the art style was pretty unique. i also noticed some collision bugs but it didnt detract from anything

Super ambitious entry! There's a lot of systems in this game that interact in interesting ways. It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, though, and I found it a little frustrating to play. My camera sensitivity was super high no matter what my mouse was set to, and there was significant lag as well, so I didn't manage to get that far in the game.

Overall, solid work!

@sam-gorman
Thanks for playing and the information!

The mouse sensitivity is good to know, I will add a sensitivity slider for the fixed / updated version coming to itch.io tomorrow.

The lags are unfortunate, it might be because of the lighting method (Lumen) that requires some raytracing capabilities.

Impressive how much effort you put into this game, so many things implemented and it looks really cool! Unfortunately it lagged a bit on my gaming PC and my mouse sensitivity was way too high while running and shooting, while it was somehow too low in the menus to navigate properly. Also, it was hard for me to figure out what to do with the pressure of the waves already attacking me, but maybe with a less laggy experience it would have been more manageable. Your idea to give control instructions in the pause menu is really helpful!

Wow that's a lot of features included for just 72hrs lots to do! Suits the theme great and was fun to play. It's always nice to see game jams were people go all in, nice work!

That's a lot of work! Had some fun running circles from those swarms of monsters :D I can mention a couple of things that I think could be simplified a bit:

- there are tons of ore types you can see in UI but you don't influence which one you get and you just sell all of it right away, so, in fact you don't really care, but UI make it looks like it is important.

- There are many different places, like, shop, selling point, upgrades shop, You need to interact with which one separately and while they are in a single "zone", it still feels like they are quite distant from each other and are separate places you have to "keep in mind in figuring out". I think making just one place would've simplify perception and make them feel more player-friendly.

- You forced to sell ore one by one, and that just feels irritating, cause you have to take care about alot already - reloading, dodging monsters, getting the ore, etc.

So, it's all pretty minor stuff that can be solved one way or another, but my general impression is - I, as a player, was a bit overwhelmed by stuff. So, I think the experince in general can benefit from having maybe less - but more polished and simplified features\mechanics.

Anyway, amazing, how you guys managed to get so many things done, great job making a game!

@kamuniaft Thank you for playing as well, indeed we were stressed out until almost the last hour before submission :)

About the things you listed:

1. correct, the ores all do basically do the same thing, they just have different selling values and are for visual variation. A few less would have also done the job, that's true, it was a bit of a hassle to change all of them each in some cases when a change was made as well ;)

2. good to know that you had a bit of a difficulty figuring out the places, we hoped that the custom signs would be enough but we'll keep that in mind in the future!

3. yep, the ore selling wasn't supposed to be like that, but we had no time anymore to reprogram the selling feature again and it ended up being an unintended button meshing ""mechanic"" that can be quite annoying I agree

In the future we will try to have less feature creep and rather 1 or 2 core mechanics that we spend our time on! The artists in our time would also really appreciate that ;)

Really solid entry! I ended up playing for a while until I got all the money, definitely a lot of fun. Some future things you could add would be some more things to do in between collecting resources and fighting enemies, such as smelting the ore or collecting resources above ground, and of course more upgrades to work towards (not feasible for a jam, but if you wanted to continue working on it). Also nice that everything was made from scratch!

Very cool that you did everything by yourselves! Took me sometime to understand the mechanics, and the bullet drop was a bit too high in my opinion. That said, a nice solid entry, had some great time killing some enemies and collecting crystals around the map! Nice entry folks!

Lot of different things added within the timeframe. Especially making everything within the team. It's a bit confusing to start with in terms of all the information, especially the lists of controls and ores. Cool entry, well done!

This is an impressive game for sure. Lots of art, good loop, an upgrade system, and ending.. it's got it all! If I had one complaint, it would be that the movement speed is too slow - I felt like a fat slug who was glued to the ground lol. I think increasing both the player and the enemy speed would instantly make this game more fun. Perhaps adding another bucket/pulley on the other side of the hole as well (maybe on you have to pay to unlock?) could introduce some more movement and decision making into the loop as well.

Either way, great work on this one, congrats on a successful jam!

Great game, only had some lags in the beginning so maybe introduce a loading screen or something and the minerals kept jumping out of the basin when it got pulled up. Loved the artstyle and the atmosphere and the crank thing was a fun idea.