Diamond Down Below

Cute little jam game!

Fits the theme really well!

The sprite art is good and the controls feel polished. However, the game was a bit short and the difficulty varied greatly with each play through. On one play through I dug straight down and found the diamond instantly. In another one, I struggled finding the diamond. Maybe you can spawn the diamond in a place that is farther from the player. Also, there is a bug in the game. If you have the game in fullscreen and continue the game after you win or lose, when the game reloads the view is zoomed out and the lighting is messed up. Overall, a fun, fast, and addictive game. Impressive for a solo entry.

While it's fun to blast through the dirt and stone like it's made of butter, and I like the way the ground obliterator rotates with your mouse direction, it seems like this game has a somewhat easy optimal strategy, since the diamond was at the bottom layer in all my playthroughs. That is, just blast (almost) straight down (unless you can go faster by stepping to the left or right by a single block) and then just look on the bottom 'floor' for the diamond.

This was made even easier when I discovered the main character could clip throught the blocks at the bottom, when moving sideways.

It's a nice base to work from though. You could go into lots of different directions with this.

I feel like this was inspired by Minecraft. Now if only there was a bazooka in Minecraft…

It's cool that the world is randomly generated. I just wish there was more to it, perhaps a monster to defeat instead of a randomly placed diamond that you have to find within the time limit. I liked the graphics :). And the shadow effect around the player was kind of cool too.