Miners4k

appel · December 20, 2005, 1:01pm

I think if you were to increase the window width at least 100 more pixels then it would be a lot more fun to play, and easier to accomplish the levels, as they are pretty darn hard

Anon666 · December 23, 2005, 10:54am

Malohkan:

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

you have to be kidding!!!

Killing your miners is the best bit!!! =D

_ERROR · December 23, 2005, 1:24pm

Not sure if u guy already know this, but found this strat pretty effective for climbing up-hill

http://myjavaserver.com/~coredumped/tunnel/miners.png

Great game! very addictive

Markus_Persson · December 30, 2005, 10:46pm

New version up with fixed timing. It should run at the same speed on all computers now.

I had to speed up the splat animation (removing some frames) and tweak the level variables a bit, but it’s down to exactly 4096 bytes again.

Unless there are more major bugs, I’ll consider this entry done and move on to my next one. =)

woogley · December 31, 2005, 3:00am

excellent job markus. this game is tons of fun and very popular. not only is it the most downloaded 4K 2006 game thus far, its also the 3rd most downloaded on my site ever. this means that two of Markus’ games are in the top 3 downloads of Java Unlimited! (Dungeon4K, 4K-tris, Miners4K). If that doesn’t spell game quality, I dont know what does

Markus_Persson · December 31, 2005, 1:11pm

Sweet!

Markus_Persson · December 31, 2005, 4:01pm

One more version, a bit tweaked. 4093 bytes.

Oh, and source code!

nonnus29 · December 31, 2005, 11:12pm

Thanks for releasing the code! Nice job on the comments, they make it ALMOST understandable…

;D

Serph · January 2, 2006, 4:02am

Found quite a few bugs…

If you are collecting gold to fast, some of your miners will get stuck between the wall and the rising gold pyramid…

I found a critical bug where the gold deposits don’t disapear… so I can collect 2000 gold in a matter of seconds. Instead of making the gold deposits disapear… it just makes dotted vertical lines in random places…

I decided to suicide my miners… and I ended up with -1080 miners… notice the negative… after all my miners were dead the round didn’t end… probably because of the - miners.

Markus_Persson · January 2, 2006, 9:01am

I’ll look into it

Riven · January 2, 2006, 9:04pm

Gold isn’t removed from the ground anymore. IIRC it was collected in the first level(s) but after that the gold-deposits yielded infinite resources.

Update: well, it depends on the level, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t… seems to be random.
Update 2: seems to depend on the angle: they don’t take gold (but carry it away) if the gold is below them

http://www.songprojector.com/temp/miners.png

http://www.songprojector.com/temp/miners2.png

Markus_Persson · January 3, 2006, 6:05pm

Fixed? Maybe?

Miners will slowly drift upwards if they get stuck in gold now.

nonnus29 · January 3, 2006, 11:49pm

Oh the pain of bug fixing 4k code…

;D

I hope you have a back up of an early version of the game, just in case…

Markus_Persson · January 4, 2006, 8:14am

Unfortunately, I don’t, heh

But it seems to mostly work now, except for no digging gold under row 1024