A Dungeon Miner
Note that this game is a post-jam version of a game I made for Ludum Dare 48, with some more time put into it. This game includes some things I wanted to add to the original, but couldnt, because of the time constraints.
Controls:
Wasd, Arrow keys and Controller support.
About Controller support: Only xBox 360 Controller has been tested.
X: short jump
A: Long jump
Left Joystick: Movement.
(you can also use space to jump when playing with keyboard)
In this game...
In this game you control a small miner, who has found a dungeon entrance, in the dungeon there may be some treasure, so are you going to find it?
There are 4 levels.
Comments
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I have returned, now with a better computer.
You said you optimized it, but I wasn't able to tell how much, because of said better computer.
In any case, I was able to play it, and beat it. Here are my thoughts.
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So this was made for the Ludum Dare 48, and when I searched it up, the theme was Deeper and deeper, and the first thing I thought was "this isn't going to be good", because the main challenge with platformers is the difficulty of moving up, and if the goal is to constantly move down, what would be left?
Another thing is just how absurdly zoomed in the camera is, it makes it difficult to look... anywhere, and combined with the insane gravity and the theme... eek
Fortunately the level design is pretty good!
The torches are a great way to lure the player to certain directions, and most importantly, tell the player where is safe. Campfires I think indirectly contribute to that, as they both have something to do with fire, and sense campfires are safe, the torches would be safe too.
Coins didn't have much of a use, but they also guided the player, which was nice.
The last level was a bit of a mess, because of how artificially difficult it was. The platforms were too small to land on consistently, and the wind stuff was just evil. I would die, and I would get frustrated, and try to speed back to where I was, only to die again because of the difficulty. The hitbox size of spikes also contributed to that, they were always way too large.
The art was very good! As I said earlier, the background is a bit noisy, but it is tolerable.
Music is repetitive, but the sound effects were nice.
Annd that's it.
Question, I noticed that the player can jump when they are about a tile above the ground, is that intended?
Thank you for the review. Yes, The player was intended to able to jump when it was 1 tile above ground. That was made to be able to make the controllability of the player better (It would not feel great if you had to be pixel perfectly on ground).
That is pretty cool! Not many people do... anything like that.
I remember that's how I used to do it, but I realized that it was too inconsistent, and would result in the player jumping higher than I would want them to.
I figured out a more consistent and better-looking version, where instead of checking if I jumped a few pixels off the ground, I would check if I jumped at all, and store a number into a variable(like... 4 frames. I'm not sure what you unity users use). The jump code would be activated by that variable > 0 instead of an input check. That would make it so if that variable is more than 0, if you are touching the ground, you would jump immediately. Every tick, I would subtract 1 from that number, and now we have a system similar to the previous, but it naturally takes gravity into account, and it looks better because we wait until we touch the ground, then jump.
Here's what it could look like in code:
//beginning of tick
if (input.jump) {
jumpBuffer = 4;
}
//wherever your jump code is
if (touching_ground() and jumpBuffer > 0) {
jumpBuffer = 0; //this is to prevent unwanted jumping
//jump code
}
//end of tick
jumpBuffer -= 1;
Thanks for the code part, I actually used unitys Physics2D.OverlapSphere, it was more efficient and had better results in testing.
Btw I'm now on my crap computer again.
Very well done with the optimizations!
Review:
No pixel art game should run this bad.
I wish I could play further than the first checkpoint, but I can't, this game is literally unplayable.
Moving platforms combined with the lag and slidey player physics, don't do that.
I might try to continue, but it's just so laggy.
Other than that,
The art so far looks nice, the background wall are a bit noisy, but it's fine. The music loops too soon, and it becomes kinda repetitive.
Thank you. I am not sure why the game lags so much, but I found out that after 5-30s the lag will mostly dissappear. I will try to optimize the game as much as possible.
What engine do you use?
Try to deload anything not on screen, and only load things when they are close-ish to the screen.
I just realized that you use Unity, which I'm not very experienced in... sooo... shrug
My suspicion is that the levels are too large, and there too many things running code and drawing.
As I said earlier, unloading anything that is off-screen can save a lot of frames. Try to turn on what Unity calls Occlusion Culling to prevent things from rendering when it doesn't need to.
I'm not sure if this is how it works, but having a lot of physics objects in a huge level could cause quite a bit of lag(in my experience, it does), which is why you should be unloading stuff.
Something else that could cause lag could be loops that run too long, so that might be something to investigate.
Yeah, for some reason the original version (https://pxldev.itch.io/a-dungeon-game-made-for-ludum-dare-48) runs much better
I have optimized the game as much as possible. The lag is only present on only the first level (only about 5-30s)
Note that If the game lags on the start, you have to wait it out (about 5-10s).