Event Horizon Miner

Considering all the text you wrote out, I honestly think the game would've done better without it; the visual layout and interactive elements of the board itself make it very easy to learn on the fly from my experience. Just through the numbers and positioning of my mining stations, I was able to learn the game without actually reading the text at all. I think the only piece of text you really needed on the left was the instruction that mining stations have to placed on one of the corners of a planet's hexagon.

As I mentioned, the visual layout and movement of the circles is lovely to look at, and creates a very nice gamefeel when combined with the music and sound effects; great job on making this all look so smooth in the gamejam's time limit! The game itself is fun, but the novelty of it ends shortly since there are plenty of ways to keep your resource chain going, even unintentionally (at one point I just started placing a mining station on every new planet that came in for an infinite loop). If you're feeling up to it, I'd recommend establishing a couple of extra goals in the game you make for the next gamejam, to give the player more management to be worried about.

Oh dear that's a lot of text right off the bat, would have appreciated if all the explainations were segmented! Okay so I guess I'll detail what was my approach to understand how the game works, as I think it might be useful info?

1. I personally learn better by doing rather than seeing (/reading), so I was very confused by all the text, tried to read a few, but then felt that I'd just learn by trying random stuff until I feel stuck and have to read So I try, but clicking on the big bright shapes (cause it seems to be the obvious thing to do) doesn't do a thing
2. So I guess I go through the reading, read through it all but didn't felt like I knew how to do something. Until I realized what you were referring to as "planets" were just the round shapes, but I kinda went through that detail cause I didn't think it was important to view them as planet (I mean, I guess it's my bad there, but things didn't feel obvious to me)
3. So I manage to place some mining station, can't anymore and just right click until it tells me to restart. Trial and error seems unable to make me learn what to do so far
4. So I read through the text again (so that's the 2nd time - or 2nd time and a half if you count my first reading) so it feels like a chore at this point
5. the terms used don't "speak" to me because they're just numbers in the end, I would have liked a symbol or something, or just show an image of what a ressource is (in thise case, showing the number on the planet i guess?)
6. "it's about getting continuous access" was a difficult sentence to process for me, as I don't know what "continuous" means in that context
7. I'm confused by the text, so I just keep trying. I'm not 100% sure how to get new mining, but i just keep trying
8. not sure what contact points mean, but I assume a minig station near 2 planets connect them
9. Aftr a few more trials and error, I don't exactly get the game that much but I found a strategy that allows to survive. I notice parts of the UI that wasn't really "made obvious" like the "gems" that represent my number of mining stations or ressources (i think they're the infamous ressources? but... i'm not sure) things per each color. It might have been mentioned, but in my brain, these felt unimportant at first and I only realized they were EXTREMELY important after a few more tries. So basically, when i'm missing a specific ressource color, I just place a mining station between several planets (it took me a while to realize i really gotta plan in correspondance to the surrounding planets) with as much of the color as needed, and if possible the closest to the "entry" point, and as far as possible to the spiral's center
10. This strategy didn't make me feel like I was understanding everything, but it kept working so instead of viewing it as "I'll strategies this way" I was thinking "I'm missing X ressource, i'll just place a mining station near set ressource" and it makes me feel like i'm missing out on the game's expectation of the player

Okay so now I feel like I've played enough, tbh I think I can keep it going forever as I never run out of ressources so I'll share my current score

All in all I just wish you had a playable and simple tutorial for people like me who are a bit dumb/slow to understand and need to do something to get how it works

I also wish the visuals weren't as simple as I think having more figurative elements would have helped a lot to make it more intuitive

That put aside though, it's rather addictive and pretty cool, even if difficult to get into at first!

Okay, mechanically? Super cool. I also am in love with the visual style. The way resources don't carry over turn to turn is certainly really neat, and that combined with your things constantly being pulled into the hole gives this a very unique feel compared to other resource management games. I do wish there was more reward for accumulating lots of resources other than just score, though. Also, I don't much see the 'island' influence. Great game, though!

Not sure how long I spent playing this but it was quite a while. I would've liked to see a bit more balancing on what planets entered the orbit of the black hole, it happened multiple times that I had no planets of a certain color. I did enjoy it quite a bit. Think my turn counter speaks for itself (I went on for a bit longer but my score went down from there). I am having a hard time seeing the Island theme but I really like the animations and juice.

Not seeing the island theme here. Interesting game, mechanically very nice, except there's no way to exit the game and also it is possible to fudge a high score by spamming right click after the game ends. Does seem to have potential to go on forever as well.

Really cool and unique game! Hope to see more of it in the future!

This game is really interesting! It subtly reminds me of Catan, but infinite and ever changing. It was fun to try and figure out strategies to get a high score. Really cool idea!

The animation and art style here is really well done and you've clearly had a brilliant idea with a lot of well executed and thought out processes, I think the only problem is the tutorial in a big game like this needs to be more interactive to draw people in as it's a lot to process and understand all at once - I hope you consider adding this if you continue to work on this game as it's a well executed project and a great entry aside from that! :)

Beautiful game! The rotating mechanism is brilliantly achieved, and the haunting, spacey ambient noise really makes it feel like you're watching a black hole consume everything. Admittedly, the gameplay itself is too deep for me; I understand the premise, but I'm not smart enough to plan ahead and place mining stations effectively, so I keep hitting the fail state pretty early haha. Brilliant game though!

Beautiful game! Would you mind explaining how you did the rotation animation?

Gameplaywise, it looks confusing, but after a few turns it wasn't hard to understand what was going on.

Great job!

I love this concept and had fun playing around with it. At the moment it feels like the start of something great, but needs more to work towards (different building types or even goals for certain resources). One thing that could be fun is a randomised (and escalating) goal for building your next station (e.g. 1 red, then 2 tan, and so on). Then the overall goal could be survival.

Here's some serotonin. I had to restart the game and take another screenshot because I forgot to last time.

Overall, I think it is a really interesting idea. I was a fan of your other jam entry, The Kingdom of Land. The thumbnail of this one reminded me of it. You definitely have a real knack for polishing up and designing these interesting abstract strategy games. I think the concept is unique and has some really interesting promise if you choose to expand.

The game was very pleasant to play. Relaxing puzzle game once you get past the complicated description. Believe me, I understand your pain. I think my game has a steep learning curve and hard to understand tutorial too. In your case, I felt its bark was worse than its bite. The game was easy to reset and it is easy to just try things without getting punished. So once I started playing, it kinda just clicked into place.

The soundscape is really pleasant and fits into the puzzle aspect well. Kind of game to zone out on and just have a really nice chill time. Same feelings that The Kingdom of Land gave. For these kinds of puzzle games, I think the satisfaction of performing an action feeds into why you keep playing. I love playing Dorfromantik when I want to relax and unwind. I think this game fulfills that same itch. Insanely satisfying to perform actions and the lack of punishment

I was thinking about how a player could amass mining stations and place a lot of them down. But I think part of feeling satisfied with the score is how much you can get in as few turns as possible.

I did think sometimes the board did not have enough of a certain colour as you can tell from the screenshot. But not a big deal.

Really nice abstract game, great work!

Pretty neat game. I like the style and the polish. I think it has some issues though in terms of balance, and I was able to completely break it fairly easily. IDK how to link an image, but I got a score of 50 fairly eaisly. My strategy was to put down a station on one of each resource then cycle through for a bunch of turns till the stations were all gone and repeat. This let me get 108 stations in a couple minutes. Then, I just cycled through turns until I got a pretty good distribution of each resource, then filled the entire board with stations.

I think if I were to give my advice on what to change, it would be to make points cumulative in some way. Right now, you're really rewarded for saving up stations, and there's no reason to try and score points until you have a bunch of stations.

Even though I just spent a paragraph or 2 explaining how to decimate the game, I guess the fact that I played it that much shows that I really did like it. Great job!

Really well done, I stopped after 200 turns. It's fun and engaging but the challenge doesn't seem to increase so it seems like I could go forever. Overall awesome game

I really like the idea behind this game, and the art and animations are insanely satisfying to me! I got to turn 575 with 103 mining stations avaiable when I decided to stop playing, I'm not sure if I missed something because I decided to stop, but once I got passed the inital 15 or so turns I found it increasingly easy.

The two most effective startergies I found was either not spending any stations and just putting 1 station on each type of disk as far away as possible from the black hole, since theres no reason to add more as far as I know, so as long as you have more than 4 stations you're good. I also found just pasting 6 stations on the first disk netted me between 5 and 10 goes where I'd get stations, if I was missing a disk type I'd just put one station on it and thats how I quickly got to 100+ spare stations lying around.

I really like the game, art and idea, but I think I optimized the fun out of it on my playthrough, regardless it was really satisfying to watch. Creating puzzels seems difficult, so I don't know if this is valid but my advise would be maybe limit how many stations you can hold onto or maybe adding gaps in the chain so its not as easy to use one disk to get all resources. Perhaps a game over if you have no stations left or something? Really cool concept! Thanks!

This is really original, and I had fun with it. My score after 50 rounds was 5, and it was 9-6-8-5 for all of them. Not really sure what it had to do with the theme, but it was a good game.