Secrets of the Moon Game for Minetest
Secrets of the moon is a game about discovering what the moon is made of by excavating it. It was made in less than a week for the Minetest 2022 GAME JAM and features many original assets: sounds, textures, a model and even a little bit of music..
Compatibility
Tested on Minetest 5.6.1, backwards compatibility not guaranteed.
Licence
All my original code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 (AGPL), but there are some submodules with other licenses.
All my original media assets are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 Licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0), but there are some other licenses, all Creative Commons of some variety as far as I know though.
See the source tree for full licence info.
Mediocre
A degree of realism to this game: The 4 nodes included in the mapgen are pretty similar to what you'd find on the moon in real life. This works well as a short collection game, but isn't really interesting. The title is sort of false advertising, as there is no secret to find :) In the future, it would be interesting to incorporate more elements so that the game is playable for longer.
Additionally, there is currently a crash you can make by clicking the jackhammer on many nodes very quickly.
Unfinished farming game with annoying physics
There's not a lot to do but drilling, and contrary to other games' standard tools that you can use by holding down the mouse button, here players have to spam-click. Also, I don't know why but the author has decided to limit item stacks to 5 items each, making the process of collecting the 200 requested nodes kind of annoying (I haven't finished that). There is no reward feeling in general.
Instructions: the positive thing is that the author has included them (which shouldn't be taken for granted), the negative thing is that they consist in a raw wall of text that only appears when a player enters the world. So if you close them by accident or you want to double check something, you must close and re-open the world. I appreciate the irony about the jackhammer not working properly to justify the left click spamming, but... heh, it's not gonna cut it.
Controls: I get it, we're on the moon and, actually, the first time I've jumped I was positively impressed by this nice touch. But after a couple jumps, you just don't want to jump anymore, ever. It slows down gameplay so much, as if the collecting in stacks of 5 wasn't enough. Also, there is this dark mood in the game, I wasn't sure if monsters were gonna spawn to kill me or anything (maybe related to the title). Felt a bit like Slenderman, without being sure if there was actually a threat outside. That could be seen as a nice touch, but I've closed and uninstalled the game before having an answer (so I'll just have a look at the code)
In general, it's highly unfinished
honestly, i liked it
i am not sure why everyone is hating on it, it was a nice game, when i played it i just needed something to do, it was a simple but commitable mission, i liked how the drill needed to recharge every so often, and i liked the gravity affect, it created a sense of realism, what did you expect haters? its the moon for heavens sake! not xaenviroment! of corse there are only four nodes, once again its the moon, from what i have seen, there is nothing saying this is supposed to be an adventure game, it is meant to be purely educational, not entertaining. not only that, it created an easy to use game base, which can be used to place a structure on air in a game, which i intend on using in in my next game. ----ps i hate it when everyone just hates on something at the same time, its just unreasonable and unnececary.
Sometimes a bin goes a long way
I would have liked to recommend this as an educational mini-game, but it prevented me; it does have educational potential, though. The ending was funny, with the trombone sound. The charger was neat! The mapgen is standard, but nice nonetheless, and the game doesn't overstay its welcome either, being over quickly if you don't dig down...
As I said, even though it teaches the geology of the Moon, the fact every single material you mine in eccess has to be placed again in the world leads someone who, to their dismay, committed the mistake of starting to dig downwards, to spend even more time at it; and for what? To be left angry at yourself for wasting said time lol.
I'll try this again when it receives some more content additions, for now I can't recommend it.
v (More in the comments) v
You just collect 200 moon rocks, that's it
Overall rating
No recommendation, because there's way too little to do, and it crashes often. However, I like this submission a LOT more than Occupy Moon since at least an actual effort was made to do something new from scratch rather just mushing together Minetest Game and Technic. So, I appreciate the effort. :-) Maybe this game will be more interesting with more missions, content and in general just more stuff to do and more challenging gameplay.
Gameplay
The gameplay is very simple: You grab your jackhammer and dig as many moon rocks as you can, then you return them to the base. There's a catch: Your jackhammer needs to recharge, so you might need multiple travels. But this is really the only thing the game has to offer: Once you collected 50 rocks of a total of 4 types, you win. The game's only real challenge is to remember your base location, which is easy if you place moon rocks as some kind of waypoint markers. Not every rock will be right at your doorstep, so you might need a longer trip. But that's really the only challenge. I don't think it is even possible to die / fail, or at least that's very hard to achieve.
Mapgen
Unfortunately, it appears it's just the default mapgen with different blocks. Since it's a moon game, I would at least expect something like moon craters, but I could not find anything unique about the mapgen. The strangest thing about the map is the HUGE amounts of moon ice.
(review continues in the comments)
good job!
It is boring but the mechanics are insane!