Defenetly needs a reset button. Ran out of gold on level 6. Some workers are stuck in the gold pyramid. So all I can do is wait 30 min so that I can start over. A pause button would also be nice.
Fantastic game. My favorite so far.
Just to give an idea of how slow this runs on my Mac… On level one I had a very basic ‘V’ shape to get to the goldso it was a straight walk in and out. I had the tunnel drawn before any miners got near it and they went straight to business. I managed to get a score of 4 before it timed out. :o 
BufferedImage img = new BufferedImage(640, 480, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Graphics gr2 = img.getGraphics();
int[] pixels = ((DataBufferInt)img.getRaster().getDataBuffer()).getData();
Runs insane-o fast for me.
I use getRaster too. However I found that all awt operations with the BufferedImage as the destination go really really slow on OS X (I think it keeps doing format conversions on the whole image), so look out for any of those.
Try using
g.getDeviceConfiguration().createCompatibleImage(...);
to create the bufferedImage It takes a few more bytes but for me in doubled my frame rate.
New version!
- Control + left mouse button acts as right mouse button
- Stopped drawing to the raster, had to add double buffering (ate a lot of bytes, but might be faster on mac now… let me know)
- Added another level after the last one as a “reward”. It’s twice as deep as the biggest level so far, and is meant as a sandbox playaround level
- Pressing “k” will kill all le^H^Hminers so you can restart the current level
- Exactly 4096 bytes!
It is much faster now on Mac, but still seems harder than when I play on Windows.
btw, I think Mac prefers TYPE_INT_ARGB_PRE
I really should work in some kind of proper timing instead of just a Thread.sleep(10)
I am sure you must be really tired of hearing this, but: Great Game!!!
It feels really complete. Feels quite nice to controll hords of “le^H^Hminers” 
I noticed that it is quite important to have a good mouse to play this. I had pluged in my USB mouse via a converter to the ps2 port a while ago because I had run out of usb ports. Don’t know if it was the mouse or the plug, but it made the game completley impossible to handle. Plugged in another mouse to a USB port and made it much better. I think it would be a nice feature to be able to alt-mouseclick to something to smoothe the surface/make it straight.
Miners count is slightly hidden by the frame on my webstart window (anything possibly above it completly hidden). Maybe just move down the info text a few pixels.
Best gameplay so far!
yeah, the speed makes it bloody hard on my home PC &_&
Hmm… now game is almost unplayable… After lets say 1 min of playing miners started to move approx. 3 - 5 times slower (and time remaining to complete level pass at same rate). Then, 1 min later, they regain original speed, but only for few secs, and so on… I simply can beat the level with SLOW miners :’(
er… ok…
Markus, i am not complining on how bad gamer i am… I really think that there is bug of some soft. These miners have never had slowdowns before (2-3 days before).
Or they are supposed to change their running speed (to crawling :-)?
Either you changed something or it was false alarm… Now things look as they should and i filnally passed lvl 3 >:(
I’m working on a version with fixed speed (I have no idea why I didn’t do that from the start…). Should be done tomorrow.
Well I won 
http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/194/screenshot0105na.jpg
On level 7 can’t win because of this problem
http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9806/screenshot0113pk.jpg
(The problem is I can’t mine deeper)
Notch please allow us to miner deeper so I can stop suiciding my miners in boredom
I noticed once you have several thousand gold, your pile of gold goes past the concrete floor. Making it difficult to get back up.
Its pretty hard to play with a touchpad on a laptop. Could you make it a bit more user friendly for us laptop users in 4k?
Finally please can we have a nicotine free version? I’ve been wearing the patch trying to quit (too addictive) Or you could fullfil our cravings by making the levels endless and harder each time? As each new level I need an increased difficulty to satisfy my cravings.
I noticed that bug myself… sloppy coding, I’m afraid.
I haven’t had time to work down the latest version under 4kb, and I’m going on a two week vacation after today
Wow, this game is really cool; I would have no idea even how to begin making this (well maybe beginning, but not far past that) under the 4k limit. It’s a unique game too, and with simple, fun controls.
But as much as I hate to say it, there are speed problems. On an 850 mhz computer I can just barely beat level one (last time I had 1 second left), but if I go over to my 2 ghz computer I can win with 30-40 seconds left easily. It’s a significant difference.
There’s two options I can think to work around this:
- Separate processing and graphics - I’m assuming the graphics are holding it back because it’s pure Java2D. The framerate would be lower in some cases but it would be more playable. Also, are you using BufferStrategy? From what I saw of your code it didn’t look like it, though that method has always worked well for me.
- Slow the game clock down. If you need to, approximate the timer to seconds during a “normal” computer speed, and work based on that. Every tick of the clock should be when a frame updates, that way you’ll know an exact number of frames will have passed over the course of the level, and everyone will have had effectually the same time.
Wow I have just spent a LOT of time playing this game
Levels 1-3 were very very good. I really felt like I was learning strategy and skill for the game. Then I got to the level with slime, and I tried the idea of sending 1-3 guys in to suicide near the start and take out nearby slime balls, and then I just essentially made a bigger and bigger U shape to get to all the gold. In the previous levels I made tunnels and worked out strategy to convince my guys when to go down and went to go up. In this level I just made a big U and tried to go as fast as I could since I had sooo many guys. I was racing against the clock essentially to keep up with the rising slime. So I beat that level and felt lucky and also felt like I didn’t use as much skill.
I can’t remember if the slime level is 3 or 4… but when I got to 6 and it said I wouldn’t beat it… yeah… it was right I just could move fast enough really. Wow, fun stuff.
I didn’t experience any fluctuations in speed, it was all very constant for me with no spikes surprisingly. In the first few levels I could manage to keep up and with enough tries beat the levels, however past that there was just too much motion too fast to organize. I think making the whole game just a LITTLE bit slower would be nice. Or a button to change the speed even.
All in all, great game! Amazing for 4k for sure. Good job
Dec 18 12:02am
EDIT: I keep playing the first few levels over and over I get to the level with slime and close the game. Dead miners make me sad so I don’t want to deal with the slime haha.
Dec 18 11:33pm
EDIT 2: I think I have an idea that I would enjoy! Perhaps instead of explode on slime, you could make it impassable and instead you have to take rock to the slime and deposit it to build a wall around it to contain it? Or perhaps exclude the rock part but every time a miner runs into slime, he changes one pixel of it to metal and turns around like he hit a wall… or just like it works with gold deposits, but instead of taking a pixel you simply “change” a pixel. That way you’d have to get a lot of miners on slime to stop it from spreading and keep it from covering up more gold and getting more in the way. I think that could be doable. The general code I have in my head suggests that you could take the bytes you have for the exploding on slime action and code in the “deposit metal” action instead. Hopefully that wouldn’t take too much space. Either way of course you don’t actually have to do this, but I much prefer “handling” the slime to killing poor little miners 
this game rox. cool game play