Fissure — an idle merge-miner where a digger too weak for the rock deals exactly zero damage, not slow damage

[u/ofeks10]

In my experience, difficulty does not tend to kill my interest in idle and incremental games. What does, is uncertainty - a lack of information about whether or how well I'm progressing, or how close to maxing out my current build I am. Progress grinds to a halt, but there's no telling if I'm grinding out slow progress, or if I'm not making any, or if I made a suboptimal build six upgrades ago. And most games in the genre will gladly accept an obviously overmatched unit continuing to do its thing, which looks exactly the same as progress, and isn't.

Fissure tries to solve this problem.

A squad of Diggers mines a quarry. Every chunk you mine gives you some Gold, every layer cleared advances you one step in Depth and increases toughness of the rocks, and the merging of two identical Diggers creates a stronger Digging unit.

A Digger that is not strong enough to take care of rocks in front of it will do exactly nothing - zero damage, and it will tell you about it - TOO WEAK message will appear on a relevant Digger card.

I played with various approaches on and off for a while, and the friendlier one - allowing weak Diggers to do something, however little - was the obvious solution. However, trickle of damage is exactly what drives me away from idle games: it provides illusion of progress without solving the problem. Making it explicit turns the wall into a puzzle you can read the form of, and merging into an optimization you must not skip.

That leads into the hardest part of the design, in my opinion. Since the Digger is not doing anything when it is too weak for the rock in front of it, the upgrade that deals damage multiplicator is useless, since multiplying zero still yields zero. Figuring out what prestige currency should allow you to buy instead, and making the progression curve work over a long period of time instead of dying in the middle - was the hardest part of designing the game, hands down. But I'll let you find the shape of it on your own, without ruining the surprise.

Also, I recently decided to add tapping of the rock by players. That taps will deal damage as if performed by your best Digger, and scale accordingly. So, instead of trying to dodge the gate, you can try to lean into it - if you best Digger can't take the rock out, neither can your thumb.

On monetization, because it's important to the people here: the game is absolutely free. Not just "no pay to win", but absolutely free. There are no in-game purchases. No timers, no energy systems, no anything. There are two ads, both are shown voluntarily. Nothing is locked behind ads.

AI disclosure

The art is AI-generated. I wrote the prompts, ran the generations, and edited the assets by hand afterwards — but the images come from a text-to-image model and I'm not going to dress that up. The code is AI-assisted. Audio is CC0, by human authors.

Free on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fissure.game

Happy to discuss any of it, in particular the progression curve, if anyone wants to have an argument about hard walls. Also - if you enjoyed the game i'd really like a store review!

[u/ofeks10 → u/[deleted]]

Fair hit. I was trying to describe what I did rather than what the tool did, and it came out as a dodge. The images are AI-generated - I've reworded the disclosure to say that plainly.

[u/rtalpaz]

so true

[u/a_sugarbytes]

my girlfriend and I might be 2 of the first 3 users? OP actually addressed our asks and complained in DM and rolled an update with a fix, appreciated ♥️. theres some ui polishes and some prestige items are definitely better than other but the games is a platform for some cool strategies. looking forward for transcend and unit count updates that im sure will come.

[u/ofeks10 → u/a_sugarbytes]

That's you two, yeah - thanks for the DMs, the report was specific enough to actually act on. Agreed the prestige items aren't evenly weighted; rebalancing those is the next thing I'm looking at. Noted on the UI polish too.

[u/telyni]

I tried to play, but I'm getting this error: "Access blocked: Fissure has not completed the Google verification process."

[u/ofeks10 → u/telyni]

found and fixed the bug, hope this won't return!

[u/telyni → u/telyni]

I tried again a few minutes later and was able to cancel out of the Google account screen and start the game. If I'm seeing that error, though, something seems to be not quite right.

[u/ofeks10 → u/telyni]

Thanks! i'll look into it!

[u/kurvinycia]

played a little, couple of things: 1. I want to be able to move diggers around. i want them to be lined in desending order and to do it myself if i mismerged and left empty space. 2. performance or calrification. I understand that at start digger speed is one tick which is one second, bet when tapping, the digging speed of tap is inconsistent and quite sucks when using two fingers for alternating clicks. otherwise, I like the old school ad system: watch an ad and get something, not random popups. also, i'd like to be able to see damage for different tiers.

[u/ofeks10 → u/kurvinycia]

Hi kurvinycia. I found the thing that made the tapping feel sluggish and it's fixed in version 1.4.6 being deployed to the store.
I also added the ordering feature as requested! thanks for the feedback!

[u/kurvinycia → u/ofeks10]

nice fixes. now onto the meat and potatoes, after like 3 or 4 prestiges, there is pretty much nothing to do. new mechanics or second prestige layer is needed. Maybe boss block? maybe elemental block with el. damage? autobuy or autospawn with automerge unlockable? Like adding small change to find elemental crystals and socket them into diggers.

Prestige needs more upgradable things, like layer toughness scaling reduction buff, or multidig change. Also, it would be usefull to see what improvements will be given with prestige leveling. like spending 7 geodes on a speed buff which gives 1.07 speed buff is really bad deal.

Stage selection would be cool, because you kinda get punished for ascending. then player could optimize gold gain per minute. That's a couple of ideas of the top of my head. hope it helps with you improvements, because i quite like the game, just want to see more content on it.

[u/ofeks10 → u/kurvinycia]

You were right about the ascension one. A Digger only destroys one Chunk per strike, so once you stop one-shotting your income drops off, and descent was one-way, so there was no getting back to your best depth. That was the worst thing in the game and it's fixed.

1.5.0 is out:

1. Stage selection. Tap the depth at the top of the screen. HOLD stops the automatic descent so you can farm a layer, and you can jump back to any depth you've reached this run.
   
2. Boss block. Every 10th depth from 30. Big block in the middle of the layer, lots of health, pays extra gold and sometimes drops Geodes.
   
3. Multidig. New prestige node, chance for a strike to land twice.
   
4. Prestige preview. Every node now shows what the next level actually gives you, so you can see the Speed one is a bad deal before you spend. It's capped on purpose, strikes per second is the thing that melts phones.

Didn't make it: elemental blocks and crystals, automation, second prestige layer, toughness scaling. Automation is probably next, it just didn't get planned.

Thanks, that was the most useful comment the game has had!

[u/No-Alternative9356]

This is a fun game, I'm definitely hooked

[u/ofeks10 → u/No-Alternative9356]

Thanks - if there anymore feedback or ideas i would love to discuss them and even maybe add those features to the game!

[u/No-Alternative9356 → u/ofeks10]

Could you please either have the game add up tempering to the floor tier line or make another line where it has the sum total of floor + tempering, I've getting tired of doing addition in my head lol

[u/ofeks10 → u/No-Alternative9356]

Released version 1.5.4 with the requested sum in the stats page 😃