Introduction

It's the 1st of january and we didn't upload a devlog for 36 days so here goes a new years devlog. This one is about scope creep, level design updates and tutorial updates as well as shop and gamemode updates. But first of all, the year is over! Sooo let's do a quick recap of what we managed to do this year.  As always enjoy the devlog.

Recap

We made very big progress on the game. Many of you don't know this but we actually started making the game at the end of 2021. It was not how we invisioned it however, which is why we started over. New graphics, new codebase, new UI almost everything improved and that's how 2023 basically started. Fun fact: The game originally was supposed to be named Light It Up but as a game with that name already existed we had to change it and came up with The Dark Mine. Also there was a main menu. You know what just look at these images

Old Level Select


New Level Select

Old Main Menu (there is no main menu anymore)

Old Level Layout

New Level Layout

Let us know what you think about the improvements.

The reason why it took us so long to make The Dark Mine is that we made many pauses throughout development, sometimes 1 week sometimes 3 months because we worked on the game when we had time. In September 2023 we started to make these devlogs. So everything you have seen so far in the last devlogs is what we managed to do in 2023 (mostly). But of course there were many many problems we had that we haven't talked about yet, some are old some only a week old.

Level Design

We had 18 levels done when we noticed they weren't actually fun. To explain why we need to discuss a little bit of theory about puzzle games. There are different types of puzzles:

Logic puzzles (among us crewmate tasks, often grid based), Word Puzzles (Wordle or Sudoku), Mechanical Puzzles (Rubiks Cube, Mazes, Chess) and Meta puzzles (many puzzles form a big metapuzzle) to name a few relevant ones. But what category would our game fit in? Well The Dark Mine is a physics based puzzle game which makes it a mechanical puzzle. To understand what makes a mechanical puzzle fun though we could look at what makes our current levels boring and take inspiration from other mechanical puzzle games. First of all every level seemed like an introduction to a new mechanic but none of the levels built upon that. Secondly none of the levels had a high difficulty and taking a general look at all levels they definitely didn't have a difficulty curve. And last but not least the actual purpose of a puzzle game, having an "Aha" moment that is, wasn't fullfilled after all. Take a look at this level

You have to shrink yourself to get under the rocks and then go on the Jump Pad to jump really high. Very simple but also very boring and a puzzle element is completely missing. Same goes for EVERY other level we had so far.

So we started over, thinking about every level considering the objects contained in it (box, button, planks, ...), the main mechanic you have to use to solve the level and ultimately have this "Aha" moment. With this in mind we were able to make more difficult levels so the first problem was solved. If you want to see these levels you'll have to wait for another devlog...

Scope Creep

We thought of making 20 levels and many gamemodes that could ALL apply to EVERY level (more on gamemodes here). As you might've guessed that idea was a bit optimistic and realistically completely unrealistic. But to begin with we started completely ignoring every problem regarding this and made useless levels and gamemodes anyways. I know genius. After realizing this mistake though we settled on making only 3 gamemodes and redisign the levels without trying to do too much at once. And The gamemodes would not need to apply to all levels just if it happened else they only had to apply to some or new levels. Another one solved! Next.

Shop

Here's a little reminder of what the shop looks like currently

After looking at the shop you might think: "That looks decent." NO! We didn't like the look and we wanted the shop to be more special so we decided to change it up a bit but this devlog is already quite long again so we'll share that in the next one...

Conclusion

So as you can see we changed the game quite a bit and overhauled every aspect of The Dark Mine. We hope you liked this devlog and some old images. We have done so much in 2023 and started growing a community on discord and twitter so if you want to GET THE GAME FIRST you should join the discord. As we are already pretty far in development we are certain The Dark Mine will release 2024. Next devlog is going to be about the Shop once again and maybe the gamemodes. That's it for this devlog if you made it this far that's actually crazy so thank you. Now at this point we would tell you to follow leave a comment or read our last devlogs but we are different if you haven't noticed yet.