Drill-Off
Drill-Off is an arcade style score chasing game where you fuel your mechanical drill by filling it's tank with tetrominos. You gain new skills as you drill deeper and they differ based on what color blocks you use. They help you reach deeper and allow you to gain bigger scores. Your main hurdle is different (incrementally harder) tasks that you much fulfil to keep going.
Prove yourself a pro driller by claiming a spot on the online leaderboards!
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Development log
- Post Jam8 days ago
Comments
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Sailed right past the 32-bit integer limit and had a blast doing it! :D
Really, great job designing this game. It's so fun to play, I forgot to do my chores all day.
It's not without its faults however. For one, with my upgrades I couldn't find a way to end the game, unless I intentionally played badly.
The multipliers seemed to be all over the place - the same move (placing green over green, while the entire tank is filled with green) sometimes scored 30x, sometimes 100x+. I couldn't find out why and when that happens, but it seems some of the upgrades don't activate all the time - is this intentional? For example, I (unwisely) chose cyan solvent, and sometimes it changed single-tile cyans into another color, sometimes it didn't. Same with the multiplier bonuses - it seems not all of them get triggered every time, hence the varying multipliers.
I also were wishing for more space all the time. I got excited when I got the +1 tile upgrade, but never got another one. This resulted in 4-straight pieces spawning, with only one valid placement in the entire tank. Maybe getting upgrades until you have 4x4 tank would be nice.
Please keep working on this game, it has such huge potential to be even more amazing! Also consider an android version. Would love to pass the time with this thing.
this was really fun, I broke the game and flipping scores between positive n negative values bahahahaha. Manually stopped around 4000m deep coz got too sleepy hahahaha
I'm sorry but how can I lose to keep the record...? My result became negative by about 2 billion. But if I put absolutely any block it starts to grow and the attempts only add up.... I can't finish it
Anyway, I played a little more and I got tired. My multiplier was about 200. The points became a -billion then just a billion. It happened all the time repeatedly
Yeah I stupidly assumed scores wouldn't get that high and left the score as an (signed) integer that has the maximum value of 2 billion and something after which it loops around to negative limit.
yeah, I've got a couple turns to spare
also, I'm not colorblind but some of these symbols are definitely innaccurate..
.
How did that happen?
this happens when you try to place a piece over other colors (resulting in the preview changing its symbols), but place it with one or more pieces sticking out of the tank, resulting in invalid placement, and returning the piece below, with the changed symbols.
why does nikasil say it gives +3 multiplier when it only gives one?
I got this score after I lost most of my score to integer overflow and my score going into the negatives.
Hey, hey! Love the post-jam update.
A few quality-of-life feature requests:
- Right mouse button to rotate the piece that is selected/dragged (Backpack hero and Backpack battles have it)
- Show the target number and the progress for the current task (e.g. "3/5 white fuel cells")
- Quit button that returns to the main menu (useful for the web version)
Reasonable enough! Unless you've noticed, mouse wheel, arrow keys and a/d already rotate but might as well add right click to the mix if that's de facto elsewhere.
The task progress makes sense but I've kinda stayed away from it so far because it isn't always 5 cause you can squeeze in a completion with 4 if you've got "hybrid fill". But I guess even flat showing 5 there would ease learning the mechanics...
Oh, wow! If I knew that about the mouse wheel, I wouldn't have asked about the right click. Maybe an omission on my part.
Regarding the progress - exactly the special skills make me feel less certain about what counts as a valid contribution to the task. Ideally, once I place a piece it will add to the current progress, including all "power ups"
That's definitely a cheated high score (and a very unpleasant username to go with it)
The score looks like it's 700 943 684, dunno if that is really possible. Name is indeed kinda lame...
Too hard to understand to even start. Probably fun for more patient/thought-provoking players but not for me.
White peices don't do anything for some reason. like they should make stuff white.
think about this
if you put a red on a white dose the tile become red or stay white
it becomes red
same thing with the otherway around a white on a red is red
I prefer game balence over full logic
Green energy put me in a soft lock :\ I got green filled to the brim, and i wasnt able to get any other color
Yeah, the "green energy" perk is a bit of a trap. If you end up with a full green board, anything you place will be "the least" and will be converted to green. I plan on reworking this and pretty much all the bad perks for the future version (once the jam rating period is over and I can freely update it again).
I did get one of my better scoring runs with green energy actually; I had already built up a good number of moves from recursion and enough green multiplier perks that I was able to use the twenty-some remaining turns getting a big full green score every turn until I ran out.
Yeah it can be a real good run ender really. You can keep getting full fill & 0% spillage bonuses with every of the remaining moves.
I just noticed if you have green energy and it's already all green you get a lot more points putting a different color and letting it change than if you just put green on top of the green. What mechanic accounts for that?
that was the run that got me over 10 mil btw :)
That's the spill bonus. You get +1 multiplier for each square in your placed block that changes colors. So in your case when you place lets say a blue block on all green board, they all change to cyan ie. 0% spillage (+4 bonus multi) but then afterwards they turn back to green.
Got caught in the "Green Energy" trap as well. Made it impossible to fulfill the blue/red objective.
Interesting arcade style puzzle game with color blocks.
I don't fully understand how this game works, but it's fun nonetheless. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it soon enough.
Yellow reward seems to be essential to get. A bit of balancing the perks would be nice, but great for a game jam game, got me even a bit hooked with the highscore.
i cant for the life of me figure out how to "add 🟩 or 🟦 immediately"
help please?
So you need to have five of the required color to complete it. Or actually having 5 of something else and then 4 of the required one works too.
oh... i thought you only need one.
thanks for telling me.
That would make them rather easy :D
i know its just that monkey see one square monkey think one square.
cool game 8/10
I like it! The animations are super fun and fluid, and the gameplay got me engaged, nice work!
hmm, this game is kinda average?
there's only really one way to survive any amount of time (since you eventually start only having 1 turn given to make colors), and it's through the perk that lets you stack turns, since all other perks mean wasting moves on turns without placing colors you need
also, the changing the chance for each color mechanic seems very useless, since all you'll be doing is risking the chance for turns where you can't do anything.
But the biggest issue I have with the game is that optimal move is to stay at the start of the game and keep avoiding having 5 blocks of the same color to get infinite points without any tasks ever showing up!
True. Most of the perks are basically just bad if you try to use them. And the one you mention is indeed pretty much mandatory. Sadly I didn't have enough time to do a proper balancing round for the perks and add more interesting ones.
I did consider the infinite start thing too and thought that adding a multiplier that gets bigger the deeper you go might be enough. But I guess there should be some other way to force it too.
I don't exactly mind the recursion perk being essentially mandatory, but it could be cool if maybe you had another perk that gave you bonus points for how few turns you had remaining, so that way there could be a tradeoff. And like it could be nice if the limit of how many extra turns you gain when filling the tank didn't go all the way down to 1, or there was some other way to get more turns back
In a way there already is a multiplier that gets bigger as you go deeper... as you do have to start going deeper to unlock any perks at all. I think it might be better to just immediately start giving you a turn limit as soon as you place your first tetromino to prevent staying at the beginning forever.
I do find that a lot of the perks seem detrimental enough that the goal is to go as long as you can withoutpicking them up, which is unfortunate.
Overall I love the core concept though!
Yeah, these are all things I plan on doing for the post jam version. I don't really mind "mandatory perks" either as you can target them and pretty much guarantee you get them. But it's just pretty much the only good one right now.
it would be interesting if there were still the dangerous perks that paint you into a corner, but a way to get rid of them later.
Oh yeah, for sure. More interesting that way. Also some very good ones except they have a downside.
good game. Im just color blind so its hard :(
Dang, sorry about that. Bit of a faux pas to only represent something with colors. Especially the "dimmed" versions are problematic I guess. Usually I try to take such things into account but I guess it slipped my mind this weekend. Should've added icons to them or something like that...
In case it helps, other games relying on filling squares with only a few colours needed put an icon in the square (diamond, star, circle, squareception, triangle...) or change the square's shape within the "grid." I used accessibility on one such game doing the former that seamlessly integrated with the non-colourblind experience, since the squares were still overall The Colour.
Thanks for considering it.
Very fun game, but there is a bug I encountered after playing a bit where if all the colors were one, any other color pieces would not change the colors up, so I could not fight the engine overheat despite putting only the instructed color inside.
Are you sure you didn't have a perk that makes all tiles of the lowest count green? That perk has a fatal flaw of if you end up with full green board, and piece you place will result in 4 of it against 5 of green and all will then be green.
Sadly I didn't have enough time to fully polish the different skill options and add more. Maybe a post jam version of the game is in order...
I apologize, that makes more sense, I must have glazed over the perk without reading it more properly.
If this is the case, I would like to recommend maybe the skill has a cooldown of 1 or 2 piece placements before it will trigger again?
Thanks for your response!
Yeah, it ended up being a complete trap like most of the perks in the game right now. I'll probably do a complete overhaul (in few weeks when the jam rating period is over) for all the perks so that there are some good and interesting options.