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[iceball3]

A boss would be horrible. There's no room for inventive combat. You'd drill at him or shoot explosives at him. Wooo.

Isn't that how most confrontations in Gurren Laggan went?

In all seriousness, just using enough creativity, a final boss could be made pretty entertaining with the two weapons you got. I mean, Cave story pulled that off with just a bit less restrictions, yea? It's possible.
Thinking about it, it'd be nice for a weapon that harnesses the materials inside your vac pack, sorta like a laserpew or some variant, that changes or uses up different materials depending on the type selection.

Or make him only beatable by dumping the color of mineral that he is. You'd have to dig out floating clouds that pass by and make the minerals land on him. Otherwise they'd fall into magma below and melt, if they don't hit him. You would have to use mineralvision or luck in order to figure out which clouds hold which minerals.

This is also a nice idea in itself as well.

[Yodamaster]

I had fun dropping bombs on the city from the sky with my jetpack.

[ChumpyCheese]

Hey everyone,
I'm one of the devs of Dig-N-Rig. Reading all of your posts was awesome! Great feedback! I'ts really inspiring to see so many people play and talk about the game to this length.

I'd like to apologize for the vacuum crash! Somehow we overlooked it in testing. We have actually added the following fixes:
1. Vacuum crash fixed
2. Loss of Water/Lava Resistance upon save/load fixed
3. Dig straight key. Makes player dig sideways without stepping up terrain. (all keys can be customized from the options menu)

Unfortunately the new version isn't up on the Digipen website yet. It has been handed in and is awaiting approval/upload.

We realize that most of you have already played the game and are sorry that you did not get to play a more "perfect" version the first (or second!) time through.

We also totally agree with all of the blatant balancing issues. Had we more time, less homework, and maybe just more awesome we would have loved to iron them all out!

Keep in mind that Dig-N-Rig is a student game. We are freshmen and this was written in C for windows console using ASCII in a single semester. The entire development was very challenging with long hard hours of learning, coding, art, ideas, eating food and just team work in general. But don't think that I'm trying to drown your opinions in my personal experience! Your feedback is greatly encouraged and dead on, not only because you've all made good points about the gameplay, but because games are about having fun! It's our job to ensure that other people have fun with our game and it's the ultimate reward as devs when that really works!

Not to dissapoint (don't be sad!) but the development of Dig-N-Rig actually ended a few months ago at the end of the school year. We've already started coding our game engine for next year which is required by Digipen to be written in C++ using DirectX. It is not that we don't care about our old games (quite the contrary! we love Dig-N-Rig!) but the chance that we will have time to make any major changes is unlikely. There is a massive time crunch when attending Digipen and even starting ahead on our engine will only just land us where we'd like to be at the completion of our next project.

However if you do find any more major crashes or bugs we would like to fix them. Also if you have any general feedback at all (even if it's negative!) we'd love to hear it. You can post back here or email us directly at SyntacticSugarGames@gmail.com

Thanks for playing Dig-N-Rig!
Kirk

[Draco18s]

How do you like it in Digipen?  I'd considered applying, but ended up going to a more local college.

[ChumpyCheese]

It's a great school! We learn some mind blowing stuff and I've really enjoyed it so far. As a short summary:

Awesome stuff:
1. Great teachers. Very thorough and knowledgeable in their field. A good mix of game industry and tech dev verterans.
2  Awesome material.  Learning Linear Algebra, Calculus, C, C++, DirectX etc has been a blast. Matrix transformations are extremely cool. Getting a solid foundation of computer programming has been infinitely helpful. Though not every class is taught in the context of games they can all be applied.
3. Great students. Everyone is helpful and friendly. Everyone loves games. Forming a team that works well together is awesome.
4. Lots of work to do! I'm a pretty extreme workaholic so having never ending waves of challenge is great for me.
5. Great platform. Lots of big (and small) game studios like to hire Digipen graduates. Plenty of studios show up on "career day", where you show off your game and what you're capable of, as well as throughout the year to offer internships and jobs.
6. New campus. Nice class rooms. Good food at the cafeteria.

Stuff to watch out for:
1. Really expensive. The price is pretty steep. I dare not even say what it is. Course you can get scholarships and funding and stuff.
2. Breakneck speed. Attending Digipen you must be ready to work you ass off at all times. Digging yourself into a cold hole of death can happen fast. But as I stated above, the staff and students are all willing to help. They don't want to see you die. Just ask.
3. Do it yourself learning. This isn't really a bad thing. And yes I said that everyone's helpful. But how much you accomplish is really up to you. Programming and art are a very personal learning journey. You have to put everything you've got into it.
4. Temptation to geek out. Digipen is filled with people that love games. Which means that any given day there are 10-20 people willing to play smash bros or halo or whatever with you for the next 100 hours. Balance between entertainment and education is necessary.

There's more I could say but that's a relatively accurate summary. I haven't been to other schools so I can't compare. But I really like it here. It's been loads of fun!

[Draco18s]

Sounds awesome.
I don't think I'd have survived though. XD
I completely bombed linear algebra (along with Systems Architecture and another class*).
In any case, I think any job I'd have gotten as a result would be too high-stress for me.  The one I have now is perfect.  Just busy enough to not be bored (at least, not on a consistent basis) but not so busy as to have suicidal thoughts.  I've actually had spare time to work on my own project.

*It was one where we had to build a compiler for some simple and obscure programming language.  Not a single line of code presented itself in class (although I did ask the professor once when we'd see some, s/he said "in two weeks;" I'm still waiting).

[Aklyon]

Awesome, now we've had both indie devs and college devs post here about their games.
Any idea on when it'll likely be ready on the digipen site?

[Jacob/Lee]

3. Dig straight key. Makes player dig sideways without stepping up terrain. (all keys can be customized from the options menu)

THANK YOU.

[ChumpyCheese]

@Draco18s
Your personal project sounds cool! I skimmed the thread a bit. I'll take the time to read deeper into it. I've been busy as of late. People keep chasing me for more work!

@Akylon
I don't think the Digipen staff works over the weekend so I expect come Monday? Teusday? Soon? But really I cannot say. It is not in my hands. I will however post back when I know that it's up for sure, so that everyone doesn't have to check over and over again.

@Jacob/Lee
No problem! It's a great improvement so thanks to everyone who suggested it.

[beorn080]

I'm impressed, especially for a freshman effort. It's a very fun game.

[Draco18s]

I'm impressed, especially for a freshman effort. It's a very fun game.

That's Digipen for you.  The only other school that even comes close is Carnegie Mellon.  They've got a class where groups of 4 to 5 make 50 games in 50 weeks.

@Draco18s
Your personal project sounds cool! I skimmed the thread a bit. I'll take the time to read deeper into it. I've been busy as of late. People keep chasing me for more work!

Hehe.  Just take a look at the swf I've got up online for a few minutes and you'll get the jist of it.

[Aklyon]

Wasn't really expecting much more than that, but thanks anyway!

[Roboboy33]

i crashed when i was digging at the right of rainy ruins, i think it crashes when you use the vacum to the right of the screen, were theres nothing.

[Aklyon]

Already known, we're just waiting for the eventual fixed version upload.

[Roboboy33]

o, i didnt read the entire 7 pages but i tihknk i can explain the problem, the vaccum pulls in those air pieces, and when you point it to the right weres theres nothing, it wants to make air pieces but cant, so it crashes.