A simple idle/clicker game where you dig into the depths of your childhood sandbox!

The controls are pretty straight forward, left click on the dirt to dig into the dirt blocks untill they are gone. Every cleared dirt block gives you $5 to use to buy upgrades (you sold the sand?).

You can also buy ants to help dig for you, while they start out slow they get very very fast eventually. Unfortunately I did not have time to implement a save feature so you cannot close the game without losing all progress.

warning: last second bug, you cant buy just 1 of something you need to buy 10 or 100 :(

This is the actual game as of the end of GM48 Screenshot

I have made a bug fixed version that you can download here https://edgeofentropy.com/SandboxDig_bugfixed.zip but please do not use this version for rating.

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  • BelowSeaLvL
    Lv. 7

    ever realised "just" clicking sand could be fun, it was fun. Altough it still missed some immersion/sound. I didn't got as deep as some others here.

    Graphics look great, menu buttons could have been a bit more in the same style?

  • Problematicar
    Lv. 37

    The concept is pretty good, and at first I thought it was also executed well, but after playing for a little bit I noticed a lot of stuff didn't work.

    Buying a single ant doesn't work, the game doesn't register every single click, price scaling is either broken or really badly designed, since progress starts slow and becomes slower as you keep playing. Basically the game is not unplayable, but it becomes nearly unplayable after playing for a little bit.

    But even after considering all the stuff that probably doesn't work as intended, I still really like this game, it's a clicker done right, with a lot of content, and a good correlation to the theme, the art is also really good, and a replayability factor thanks to the immortal ants.

    You still have a lot of stuff to fix, but once you do I'm sure the game will be great.

    Path Y
    Submitted

    Path Y

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    7yrs ago

    Great use of the theme! The few graphics that are in the game look nice and fit the concept well

    Gameplay wasn't as great.. Clickers should feel like they have decently fast progression at the beginning (even if you don't actually get a lot of stuff compared to later on) - this one felt very slow to begin with though, not super satisfying and I wanted to quit. I feel like the pacing at the very beginning should've been more like once you got the adult shovel. I also felt like the ants could've helped me more in the start ¯_(ツ)_/¯

    Not a terrible game, but needs some balancing

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    7yrs ago

    Sandbox dig had clean graphics that were nice for a small competition.

    Other than that, Sandbox Dig didn't have any sounds, didn't have any music, a lot of times it didn't seem to register my mouse clicks, and the buttons at the side for idle ants didn't seem to do anything.

    Prices on the tools on the right were not marked, so there was no way to tell how much tools cost so there was no way to do a little math to find out what to buy next and what to save up for.

    For clicker games it's very important that every click registers and feels satisfying. Something should visibly happen with every click, a sound should occur, and if it's a damned good click the screen should shake, maybe an explosion should occur. This could have had a lot going for it. Make it fun!

  • stubz_gm
    Lv. 2

    https://imgur.com/a/X9646

    I decided to punish myself through clicking. Yeah it was kind of funny. Basically I could no longer spam any units withought loosing money and decided to call it a day.

    I'd like to mention, I just this very moment noticed the buy X10, x100 thing. Brb.

    https://imgur.com/a/hlW3Q . Will I let the thing run and see what happens? Who knows.

    https://imgur.com/a/gMf41 Called it a day there. I don't even like the cookie clicker genre. But it was fun to think of things interms of spamming while stil making money, or the number of digits in a cost when deciding between one upgrade and another. Honestly I'm kind of surprised the game didn't break.

    Dropship
    Submitted

    Dropship

    • Nightsjester
      Lv. 4
      Nightsjester Developer of Sandbox Dig!

      7yrs ago

      :) well thanks for pushing through my game and making it more or less to the end of it. To be honest it does break after you reach over 2billion for costs and monies made because of the 32bit floats gm uses but that could be fixed fairly easily by implementing bigints.

  • Veralos
    Lv. 38

    It's an interesting concept for a game and I really enjoy the graphics, but I feel like it progresses way too slowly.

  • SpaceMyFriend
    Lv. 15

    This is great! The graphics are really good and fits the theme very well. It takes awhile to gain money. And the dirt getting harder to dig away the further you go down felt unfair.

    But i loved this regardless. I hope to see an updated version some time!

  • Vertex138
    Lv. 5

    This is a very well made game! The isometric art style was wonderfully made, and I love the concept of hiring ants to dig and do your bidding. Also, I've never seen anyone idolize our old childhood wonder of "how deep does my sandbox really go?", and that's definitely my favorite part of the game.

    However, the wonderful concepts didn't quite seem to carry over to the gameplay-- although, I'm sure this happens to every single one of us during a game jam. Digging was seemingly slow and tedious (something I didn't particularly want to remember from my childhood sandbox experiences), and the bug (or should I call it the ant?) where you have to buy 10 or 100 ants at a time made the balance of buying ants very challenging. Nevertheless, I have a friend who fell in love with this game. Seriously. He's played it for HOURS now.

    This is definitely a game I would love to see improved upon in the future. You have a gem of a game here! You just need to clean off the years of accumulated sandbox residue.

    Unstable
    Submitted

    Unstable

    • Nightsjester
      Lv. 4
      Nightsjester Developer of Sandbox Dig!

      7yrs ago

      :) That truly means a lot to me to hear that your friend enjoyed it. I strongly suggest they play the less buggy version posted in the description of the game. I agree with what you said, the mechanics is a little too tedious even for a clicker/idle game but I think I have a few ideas on how I could make it better in a less janky reworked version.

  • yokcos
    Lv. 7

    At the start I quite liked this but as I descended the flaws became very obvious. I like incremental/clicker games and this definitely seems to be one of those. The art is also very nice indeed. However, it's held back by a few problems.

    Tiles seem to require more work to dig as you descend. You get digging upgrades, yes, but this flies in the face of progression; you get more powerful but the game gets more powerful in a very boring way. An alternative way to scale the game would be to make the layers larger.

    A few upgrades seem to do nothing. The second X2 ant productivity multiplier did exactly nothing to my ants' productivity. Queen ants also seem to have no effect (Neither on dig speed nor profit per tile) In fact I went from 100 ants+1 queen+X2 productivity to 170 ants+2 queens+X4 productivity and noticed no difference in speed although the reported rate of digging increased 70% from the increase in antcount.

    Oddly, ants seem to dig about 3 tiles per layer very quickly then slow to a crawl.

    • Nightsjester
      Lv. 4
      Nightsjester Developer of Sandbox Dig!

      7yrs ago

      :) thankyou for the honest feedback. I did rush this out trying to finish it at the last minute so a fair number of bugs did sneak in like some of the upgrades not working at all... And yeah the progression element is very very uh... bad. Ill probably post a bug fixed version somewhere.

  • Allmoss
    Lv. 2

    Cool idea for a clicker game but it is way too slow, at least for me. I reached 100 ants before stopping the game. They had so little to no effect and clicking was not consistent. Sometimes it took two click to remove a block of sand and other time 10 clicks, I assume it’s a hitbox issue of some sort.

    The options to get new kinds of ant and buy better equipment is cool but at this pace I will not be seeing it. I do have other games to play and rate :D Other then that, great job!

  • Ajmal Rizni
    Lv. 8

    The isometric art really caught my eye.

    Interesting gameplay mechanics and a great fit for the theme.

    Sometimes I felt like I was clicking and the block wasn't affected, was that on purpose?

    I think it would be good if you fixed that last minute bug, linked to a new build it in the description, and clearly stated that the gm48 version has that bug but everything else is the same. Anyway, great entry, glad I played it!

    SINK
    Submitted

    SINK

  • WangleLine 🌸
    Patron

    I have bought like 50 ants, but i can't see them and the total ant counter doesn't increase :(

    Edit: The hitbox for those sand tiles are strange. It doesn't feel good mining the sand by hand (Sometimes it does not count the click at all, and it should check when the button is pressed, not when the button is released)

    • Nightsjester
      Lv. 4
      Nightsjester Developer of Sandbox Dig!

      7yrs ago

      Well this really sucks, last second bug where buying only 1 of things results in buying none, you can still buy 10 or 100 but not 1. :( The bug was caused by not having an "Else return 1" in a script.