Screenshot

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L-CLICK TO PLACE A MINING STATION.

R-CLICK TO END TURN.

PRESS R TO RESTART GAME.

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Try to sustain a mining complex in the accretion disk of a black hole by claiming the resources on doomed worlds spiralling into oblivion.

Place a mining station in the orbit of a planet to access that planet's resource and the resources of planets adjacent to the station.

Resources don’t accumulate. It’s about keeping continuous access to them as they move through the spiral.

Stations activate from the turn after they’re placed, so place them where they will be useful NEXT turn.

Look at the arrows to see where the planets will be on the next turn.

As long you have at least one of each resource at the start of the turn, another station will become available to place.

Balance what resources you claim. Your score is determined by whichever resource you have the LEAST of.

I’m sorry this game is so complicated and this tutorial is so confusing.

This game has no end just put a screenshot of your score in the comments to give me serotonin.

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screenshot
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  • A-DSL
    Lv. 2

    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.

  • Kwis
    Lv. 67

    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!

  • dreamcastgh0st
    Lv. 2

    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!

  • Ivanbje
    Patron

    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.

    score-46
  • Jaspo
    Lv. 16

    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.

  • CrashB1111
    Lv. 17

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

  • _J_BALLA
    Lv. 3

    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!

  • Tydecon Games
    Patron

    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! :)

  • Ethan Wake
    Lv. 10

    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!

  • whatthesamuel
    Lv. 4

    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!

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Sure! The rotation animation is done by having two sets of xy values, the 'real' xy values that the game uses to calculate stuff and are updated instantly when the player clicks or a turn is ended, and values that are used to draw the sprites and effects to the screen I call 'smooth_x' and 'smooth_y' although 'lerp_x/y or eased_x/y' would probably make more sense. In the step event I am constantly running:

      smooth_x = lerp(smooth_x,x,1/10) smooth_y = lerp(smooth_y,y,1/10)

      Which means whenever the x/y position of the object is changed abruptly, the lerp function makes them do this cool smooth eased-out movement.

      So in my end_turn script, I just update all the x/y values of all the planet objects, and lerp does the rest! To make it a bit more performant you can check if x/y has changed by comparing it to xprevious/yprevious and only running lerp if there's been a change.

      • whatthesamuel
        Lv. 4

        Thanks for the kind explanation! This is great to know, might even be useful for projects outside GM!

        Again, one of the best looking games on this jam. I hope you have good results!

  • Panda-K
    Lv. 17

    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.

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Thank you for playing and your feedback - Yes I think an escalating goal is a great way of applying pressure and create a scaling challenge. I wanted to include 'roads' that linked together stations and for the different resources to be able to build different kinds of stations, but yeah... 48hrs!

  • Happysquared
    Lv. 15
    img

    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!

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Thank you for playing and taking the time to leave this lovely chunk of feedback! Yes! I'm glad this game gave you that relaxing flow-state-y feeling - I want to make games that feel good and satisfying to perform an action repeatedly. With an additional restriction that the repeated action is not violent, and ideally in some way constructive. Thank you so much for your kind words!

  • Fajpaj
    Lv. 5

    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!

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Thanks for playing and for your insightful feedback - The 'points not being cumulative' aspect was actually a quick fix to the problem that I wanted a whole simulated economy system but didn't have the time to implement it. So I took a swerve from the simulation genre into (a bit) the abstract puzzle genre and instead opted for a stripped down take on resource aquisition. I wanted something more like a single player Settlers of Catan where it was you vs the black hole. Really glad you enjoyed it and that it interested you enough to work out how to decimate it!

  • Chris
    Patron

    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

  • Quentin Van Deutekom
    Lv. 7

    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!

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Wow glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for playing and taking the time to leave feedback. Yeah you managed to spot the glaring weakness - Even if they're not very cleverly placed, placing stations at the start of the spiral will almost always be statistically the best way to get the most out of them. I'm sure there's a solution and I think having a limited amount of stations or limiting how many turns they last might be the key!

  • 2102
    Patron

    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.

    • Luke No Further
      Lv. 14
      Luke No Further Designer of Event Horizon Miner

      3yrs ago

      Thanks for playing and leaving feedback - glad you enjoyed it! The idea came out of little islands and trading resources between them - it then evolved quite a bit from there!