Play game
Drillin Frog's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #162 | 3.714 | 3.714 |
| Presentation | #394 | 2.893 | 2.893 |
| Fun | #425 | 2.607 | 2.607 |
| Theme | #470 | 2.536 | 2.536 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game represent "Slick"?
“Slick” is represented both mechanically and thematically. Oil is a core resource that powers every dig — when you’re full, everything feels smooth and under control, but when oil runs out, things get dangerous fast. Running dry causes damage and forces quick decisions, turning success into a slippery situation.
Slot jackpots, perfect drills, and wallet limits all reinforce the idea of staying slick: momentum matters, timing matters, and pushing your luck too far can make everything fall apart. Even the frog itself drills with confidence… until the slick runs out.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Gambling + digging. Wonderfully done! This was a really nice game you made.
A very original concept, I like it!
Gambling and drilling go together pretty well it seems :D
I also like that there are upgrades that will make future runs easier
All in all a fine job :)
thanks for playing!!! and thanks for the feedback!
I love the frog art, and see what you're going for with this. After a few runs of engaging with the locks and rerolls, I just started spamming "submit" as it was efficient,. I maxed out a few upgrade trees like this, but otherwise didn't know what I was progressing towards? Is there an end?
I think, like in luck be a landlord, persistence + RNG will just yield this kind of spam farming behavior. I feel like if I had a bit more decision making power, and had to make it to maybe a certain depth within "x number of extractions," I would have engaged more carefully with the decision making and push my luck mechanics.
Also, RNG works best when there's like a lot of random going on, like a match 3 board. This ensures you almost always have SOMETHING going for you in your current results. In this iteration, it's too easy to roll twice and just not get a pickaxe. Maybe consider a bigger, modern slots style board? like a 3x5 grid or something? In any case, nice work, and I hope you stick with it. Push your luck / rng narrowing games can be quite fun and I like the "dig deeper!" theme!
wow thanks for playing, this was some of the best feedback I think I’ve gotten the whole jam. So thank you for going through with such detailed feedback. I did have some influence by luck be a landlord and other slots games, I’ve seen games using cards but I thought slots would be more doable for the jam.
originally you were going to hit checkpoints that allowed you to start at a deeper depth, deeper depths have harder rocks to break but more rewards. I was even going to have specific types of gems needed for upgrades but then I ran out of time so the upgrades are kinda bare min. but I think with the feedback you and others have given me, I now have some ideas to play around with to improve the game and like you said give some more options ( a bigger slot grid sounds like it could be run )
I actually had some ideas about different frogs that work a little differently that you could unlock. I basically made the game I would like to play at it’s very very basic version.
but seriously thanks for this feedback it gave me a lot to chew on
Nice game. I went three runs. It takes a little to get going. Good experience overall. Good job!
I posted this in a comment below but figured I’d do it here for clarity as well.
how the game works:
🛢️ Oil
⛏️ Pickaxes
🔧 Wrenches
💎 Gems
🚫 Drill Denied
🎰 Jackpots
Jackpots always clear the block and give special bonuses:
I looove the frog, and the music is banging. It took a while to figure out what all the different stats and slot winnings did, but it was satisfying to get jackpots and keep drilling deeper so it was fun anyway!
glad to hear you had fun. I think i’m going to work on this post jam and have been putting down all the feedback to make it better. so far it seems like the game is fun at it’s core it’s just needs some better onboarding to teach how to play the game properly. I’m thinking of adding some features where you will know if you are going to take damage or run low on oil before hitting submit so you can better strategize if you want to lock slots or reroll or extract before the next dig takes your hp all the way down
Dig it especially the mechanics. A bit more visual polish and you gonna strike it big
Thank you!!!! I think I might just try to do that
This is a neat little game, I started playing and the next thing I know 8 years passed and here I am. I didn’t understand what the floor/ceiling upgrades do but nevertheless had some fun. The dopamine rush is real.
thank you haha. Yeah the floor ceiling thing maybe wasn’t the best way to do it. originally I was going to do individual slot upgrades so to start out all the slots have a 1-3 range so the floor is the lowest range and the ceiling is the highest range. so basically if the floor is 2 then and the cieling is 5 that means the slots can have a range 2-5. I definitely need to do better at the onboarding. I want to expand this game and polish it up with good art and sfx and such and tons more upgrades so you feel more powerful and take on harder blocks. I even had consumable blocks that would give you consumable power ups to use during a run but had to cut it due to jam time.
Neat idea, I think some clearer direction and simpler mechanics would have helped. It's very heavy on the gameplay systems with slots, wallet limit, damage, oil, block digging, but it feels quickly thrown together instead of planned out. Limiting the amount of mechanics would have freed up time for other lacking areas like artwork and design as well, especially for game jams when there's not much time.
Loved the music!
thank you for the feedback. Yeah I’m not much of an artist so I tried to focus on gameplay, but then it took me so long to get the gameplay feeling good enough to my liking that the other major component the upgrade system was lacking. Plus I realized while an incremental game sounds like it would be easy to make it’s really hard to balance it and make good upgrade trees so I kinda learned that one the hard way. Thank you for playing and thank you so much for the feedback. I had so much fun making it, I think i’m going to try to make it a full game since It feels like something I could actually complete and ship of course I’ll work to get better art UI and player experience. I need to check out your game, the name alone has me wanting to play!
No problem glad to help!
For this jam we tried to keep gameplay simple enough to put on a sticky note or two, otherwise it becomes too daunting and buggy. For our first game jam we went pretty heavy on mechanics and players ended up confused and frustrated with bugs the whole time. This jam went a lot smoother, we nailed the gameplay loop early on and focused on animations/graphics for most of the jam. Once you have a strong simple gameplay loop it's a lot easier to expand on it with later additions, upgrade systems, etc. Rather than trying to go all-in with a full web of systems at the beginning. This also helps a lot with the player understanding it too, games feel much more fun and gratifying when they slowly introduce mechanics vs. when they slam you with everything at once. I really love your driller frog concept, it's creative and you could have a lot of fun animating it with the drill bouncing up and down like a frog or something, and maybe the frog picks up gems with his tongue. For artists you can try looking for a friend who's good at art or check out the Big Mode discord, they have a huge busy chat for linking up with other people based on their talents.
Thanks for rating our game it's super appreciated :)
Slots are always good fun, was confusing at first with no real tutorial but it becomes intuitive after the first 3 to 4 rounds. I maxed min/max rolls and then maxed my wallet because banking on those jackpots is easiest. Only thing I could've asked for is some explanations around why I succeeded or failed drills.
glad you had fun and I think you along with others have hit the nail that the game just needs a better onboarding experience to try and explain the rules. I had an idea for a tutorial run that is designed to teach you the rules and really nail it down for you but I ran out of time. I think I wanna work more on this and make it better and possible get some good art and better UI for the game to really work. Thank you for persisting to figure out how to play. It’s funny in my mind I thought games like these where you kinda just do mostly the same thing would be easy but it’s actually harder than I thought haha. I’m like how hard could it be. oops
Fun idea! I love the frog-drill sprite & the jackpot effect was very on point for a slots mechanic! I think a quick tutorial or some tooltips would have helped a lot; all the info I needed was somewhere either on the hud or in the description but it still took me several runs before I actually understood how my stats were changing with each dig, & I'm still not sure why I was losing a % of my gems at the end of the run. Was it the wallet cap or some other penalty kicking in? I had fun once I started to figure it out though!
thank you. yeah that’s a theme i’m seeing which I kinda knew b/c I originally didn’t have any text or anything to tell you much. but like a tutorial run that pauses and explains things and then maybe some better ui would def help.
so one concept that wasn’t explained my apologies. if you get below 0 drill hp you only get to keep 60% of your gems. so you have to choose when to extract to get 100% of the gems you got on that run. so it’s sort of a push your luck should you try another dig and get more gems or extract safely now. but yeah it’s not explained.
but thank you for playing and thank you for the feedback.
Took a little while to figure out. Unique idea though :) Nice work!
thank you. yeah I had this idea for like a tutorial run that really walks you through the process step by step but just ran out of time and tried to do it via text. but thank you so much for playing
I haven't played this kind of game before, so it was a bit of a reverse-engineering effort to understand what's going on. I just started hitting "dig" and trying to understand what "DRILL DENIED" meant, or if the oil was good. Eventually I got there, and started actually applying some strategy... then I realised I was getting a bit addicted, and also I felt smart for figuring it out - so double win. I love the aesthetic - really set the mood (I loved the soundtrack too - it's zany!)
👋 Thanks so much for playing! 😄
I wasn’t able to time the onboarding as well as I hoped, so I wanted to share a quick breakdown to make things clearer. 💡
🛢️ Oil
⛏️ Pickaxes
🔧 Wrenches
💎 Gems
🚫 Drill Denied
🎰 Jackpots
Jackpots always clear the block and give special bonuses:
Really great look and a fun mix of ideas!
Thank you so much for playing. I added your game to my list. currently on a mac so only can do browser games, but after work I wanna hop on my pc and check out the games that require a download. So I got games to look forward to play after work haha. Shh don’t tell my boss i’m making lists of games to play
Gambling is pretty slick and this was a lot of fun! Very cute art and the popup text was well made :)
thank you so much for checking it out. i had a ton of fun with this jam
I see some Luck Be A Landlord inspiration here. Pretty fun idea I just think the ui needs to be more straightforward and pull your focus towards whats important, a lot of it felt like it all looked the same. Maybe use the icons instead of the words in the top left?
Yeah that’s really good feedback. I wanted to do more of that but I didn’t get around to it. Thank you for playing
I like the way the drill/frog is just going deeper and deeper on every level. Makes me feel like Subnatica, it always feels like "we just gotta go deeper". I agree though, a little more player control would be nice! Great job though.
Thank you. Yeah the locking of the slots I wanted to do more interesting things. I think I’ll expand on it. Everyone who commented so far gave some good feedback. I had fun making it. Originally I was going to do 3 blocks at a time so it’s kinda like you choose your target and I was going to have different currencies and stuff but I had to cut down the scope to get it done in time for the jam
Interesting mechanic and the presentation was nice when getting a jackpot, I managed to max out most upgrades but I did feel a little to much is left out of the player's control. Other games like Cloverpit have items that let you strategically move the odds in your favor, this feels a little like it's mostly all luck and you just get incremental stat increases which make you more likely to win. After a while it feels like strategy falls out of the window but I did enjoy it when I get the hang of how the game works. Two things I'd definitely recommend are showing what the results will be from your roll before drilling and showing an animation in the store so we can see when an upgrade is bought.
Thank you for the feedback. I kinda bit off more than I could chew with my original vision. Wanted to have special consumable blocks like dynamite and stuff that you eventually can unlock and give you the choice to use them during a run.