itch.io

I can replicate this issue too, and have made a one-line fix for that too. What a flurry of fixes!

Okay! Hotter hotfix!!!! Amended the level data for level 2, amended enemy load code (cages are inert enemies you can walk on), now TGO-03 properly spawns in a downed state when the cage is opened!

Nooo! It doesn't work!!! Something ELSE is wrong! Although the cage is here, it does not produce a downed TGO-03... I need to go over the code again!

Here is visual proof that the newest version generates the cage correctly. I hope it works on your end too

To explain where I went wrong: in the save file, you have characters defined with their attack/health levels (the number of HP up / POW up items each one collected), and implicitly if a character is defined in there, we assume they are unlocked. Foolishly, I kept TGO-03 defined in the basic save file, and so she was unlocked from the start.

As well, I never implemented deleting the save file lmfao

Bad news!! Deleting data doesn't work! Somehow I never implemented this! (This is REALLY funny)
I am working on a proper implementation/fix now

Okay, it is possible that you already have TGO-03 already unlocked, whoops. On the level select screen, press "A" to open the party member management screen. She was already unlocked on a fresh start for me

That's a very strange issue. What I know is the cage should not spawn if you already have her unlocked (which is actually incorrect to the source material- it should simply spawn empty if you already rescued her)

Let me review to see if I can figure out what's going wrong.

If you can, assemble a set of steps to reproduce the issue on your end, please!

That's an excellent question! It's unfortunate that the Funkey S seems stripped down compared to the Rasperry Pi making the rasbpi.

I'll ask around the official discord, I'm not the most versed in the particulars of compiling (I'm most proficient in the dev-friendly Ruby side of things) but I know the developers of the engine I use frequent their discord server.

Really, the largest obstacle (and the obstacle I have the most control over) would be alternate control scheme support- the original game only responded to the arrow keys + ZXC (and a few other odds and ends on the keyboard for advanced options), and although my recreation uses DR's all-input-form "left-right" and "up-down" for movement (so a controller's joystick or D-pad inputs should be caught), there is no way for a controller to press Z or X or C.

The graphics are incredibly cute! Though, being a 3d game makes it difficult to see the fish at a distance. (Generally I'm not a huge fan of 3d 64x64 games, dynamic scaling of visuals really doesn't work at such a tiny scale..)

I do wish there was more to do out here and under the water.

Yes, unfortunately I am not proficient with cutscenes. I hemmed and hawed about what exactly to do once the boss was defeated... In an ideal world with another two or three weeks to work on it, I'd want something more cinematic for the intro (where one might be able to see the planet from orbit, and see the spaceship from which the shop and your drilling vehicle are initially deployed), and a much higher-effort ending cutscene better explaining why what happens at the end actually happens, and a lingering end screen from which you could either "recover" and continue mining away in some New Game Plus or something, or restart or something

I was also unsure exactly how much health to give the worms, and I suspect I've drastically under-healthed the worm and the boss. Your drill does "mining_strength" in damage to worms and bosses every frame- 60 times per second- which ranges from 0.3 at the start to 12.5 at maximum upgrade level, meaning you can chew through... "750" health per second with a max drill, which... indeed... outstrips the worms and the boss by far (worms have 160 to 260 health, the boss has 200 health per heart) (though in my defense I only did this math now, and the intended combat method is bombs, which do 30 damage, and 2.5x aka 75 damage on worm's mouths and boss's hearts). My first change would probably be to, like, 6x worm and boss health (and also boost bomb damage by a similar amount (without boosting bomb damage to the player)) so drilling to attack isn't unusable, but takes significant investment instead of just being "oops I accidentally killed the worm in the way". I also wish I figured out what sort of death graphics to have for the worm, simply poofing really really sucks.

With that said, I'm glad the progression seemed well-paced, with the mushrooms and the worms and such. I spent a lot of time thinking carefully on when to introduce each new element. Mostly just wish I had more to introduce!! More enemies, more interactions, more special cases! Without such, the mid-late game kinda goes stale, effectively nothing new happens on the stretch from depth ~120 (where worms start showing up) all the way to depth 320 (where the boss lives). That's fine up to maybe half that distance, but by THAT point the game really wants another obstacle to show up. Issue is I dunno what to put down there!!

...Thank you for checking out my game!!!

You could probably chock up my frustration to my staunch refusal to play it as intended, instead playing as absolutely slowly as possible LMFAO

Compelling gameplay, overall I quite like it, but... frustrating... Specifically, my issues are:

1. The teammate abilities take waaay too long to recharge. The green teammate's ability to open and close doors is crucial for navigating the world, but they can only store two charges at once (busting through two rooms, or unlocking a door to double-check a sealed room's contents and then re-sealing it), and they take something like 30 seconds to recharge one charge at a time. My ability to clear the biomass is limited by my ability to open doors, until all of them are open.

2. On the other hand, the other abilities are sort of lackluster... The biomass scanner is vague. I understand what it does- it updates the "contamination status" of the room you're in, and the (up to) 8 adjacent rooms. Unfortunately, what actually makes a room "contaminated" is frustratingly unclear- it certainly isn't visible biomass presence, nor is it exactly "visible biomass in this room or any adjacent room" i.e. some safety margin. It is hard to tell what it is, which makes it effectively useless! The grenade, although it seems fun, isn't nearly as powerful as it could be, it isn't strong enough to make it usable in comparison to just rushing in and swinging the flamethrower around in a circle (which clears a larger-radius circle than the grenade) and, of course, that long recharge time...

3. Sometimes it appears as if biomass spawns out of nothing in a room I already cleared? You can mostly track the "source" of a wave of biomass if it hasn't already hit a wall, because it spreads outwards in all directions evenly, steadily. Sometimes when sweeping through rooms I haven't touched in a while (because I thoroughly cleaned them) I'll find what I call an "orphan source", which is a small- or medium-sized circular patch of biomass with a pod in the middle. If it were larger I'd be able to accept I'm perhaps sloppy and left a single pixel of biomass behind, but its size implies it's younger than the last time I was even in the room... Hence orphan source, spawned out of nothing.

4. The "escape" room is a real room with real biomass in it, but I can't touch it without ending the level!!! This means I can't actually sweep the entire level and clean out the entirety of the biomass, I can only keep that one room at bay, while emptying the rest of the level.

5. In a similar vein, a sealed door does NOT block biomass-spread, but DOES block my movement, which means, counterintuitively, that a sealed door is less certain to clean than an open doorway, as with an open doorway I can blast both sides with fire in rapid succession to confirm the biomass is dead on both sides, but a sealed door could be harboring biomass on either side, or in a nebulous middle region the camera's zooming between set target points does not allow you to ever permanently see (this is conjecture).

6. The guys! The guys!! They can't follow me!!! They get stuck on walls if I'm not paying enough attention! And then there is no sound alert while they're being hurt so I won't notice until they're dead... meaning I've lost one of my abilities! It's okay if it's the grenadier or the biomass scanner dude, but if door guy dies, the game actually becomes effectively unplayable (you cannot open doors)

7. The rescue operations, I'm confused on how they work. I've found one guy once before, but I couldn't figure out how to interact with him to make him follow me to the exit or something, and with the biomass encroaching on all sides, I didn't have time to thoroughly experiment. I didn't find anyone else (of the three I was supposed to find) so I assume they died to the biomass. I also returned to the room later and the guy I'd found was gone, and the marker at the top still reported 0/3 so I think he died too lol

To be clear, I really like this game. It's just that, when playing it, it FEELS like the feeling isn't mutual, if that makes sense. The game has a certain disdain for me.

If I had control of the game's development, the changes I'd make would be speeding up the recharge rates (maybe removing them entirely? They're limited enough by your ability to move between rooms, and the lives of your teammates), making the characters more cleverly pathfind the player when they're in different rooms (which is to say, move to an open door rather than trying to go directly towards the player i.e. running into a wall until you die), figuring out why biomass occasionally seems to spawn afresh from nowhere, making sealed doors prevent biomass growth between rooms (also preventing flamethrower fire from killing biomass THROUGH a door?), making the biomass scanner naively report binary whether/not there is biomass in the room (making it clearer what it does and more useful to the player), maybe adding new biomass formations that are more actively hostile to the player (something that shoots projectiles perhaps) to make it altogether harder to sweep a room completely clean.

Echidna Wars DX is available for purchase at DLSite: https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/work/=/product_id/RJ187640.html (¥1540, roughly $9.67 at time of commenting)

I would recommend supporting the original creators, who are cool and deserve support for making a very cool game

Echidna Wars Mini, the original, is still technically available at D-Gate's site https://d-gate.sakura.ne.jp/mini_wars/game.html however, in order to access it through that URL, you'll have to jump through several hoops, including using an old version of java with worse security features and an old browser program that'll accept the very out-of-date java version.

It's heavily inspired by a flash game called "Motherload", actually!

Unfortunately the original game didn't see any work beyond what's been recreated here.

I still intend to expand it myself, it deserves more levels, but Echidna Wars Mini had been shelved in favor of releasing Echidna Wars DX.

By the time you're swallowed, it's too late to escape on your own- watch your health bar!! You can only fight to escape so long as you have some HP left. If it's fully depleted, you'll be swallowed. If you still want to escape, you have to switch to another character and rescue them by attacking the monster

Unfortunately, Usaco is nowhere to be found in the assets, so I cannot add the funny bunny lady as a selectable character (and she's not in the original version so she wouldn't show up in the authentic original ver. anyways)

But yes! I want Usaco to fill the fourth slot on the character select screen, and leave the lower four for popular (in the genre) characters, like Luka (and maybe leaving one or two open for mods in the future. Would love to make characters really easy to mod in as an outsider unfamiliar with my code)

I just need an artist who can replicate the style of EWM...

The implementation isn't fully accurate, but yes the original has two healthbars over an enemy, one for the enemy and another for the hapless victim

The math is helped by the fact that at an extremely local scale, as you zoom in closer, hyperbolic space behaves just like regular space, so reflections and rotations and stuff work exactly the same. I essentially use regular physics simulation for collisions that, at the instant of impact, consider things to be in euclidean space to do the maths, then just continue moving things with complex hyper-math until another collision.

However, the speed of the ball is tied to the difficulty, and I wouldn't want to involve the player's velocity else the ball's velocity would be affected, wonking up the difficulty.

...Maybe I should have had the player intangible while moving regularly too? But yeah, being intangible is quite useful for keeping things simpler for longer, which goes against the intention to have you engage with the hyperbolic space.

Excellent atmosphere here!

Just wish I could swap between scanning and controlling one specific drone, if it's not out of fuel I'm not done using it yet!! Also would want to refuel drones by bringing them back to the listening post, but that's perhaps not feasible in-universe.

And I agree, there are lots of avenues you could take this if you wanted to, to make it a larger, longer, more intricate game.

okay WHAT

HOW did I miss this??

This is the original real asset, as in worked on by D-Gate (or Asimofu? I don't know their respective roles in Echidna Wars Mini development)

There's just this extra sachiho hurt sprite my formatted spritesheet does not have. How? Why?

...Fix will be bundled with various other changes I have made, and pushed all together as V1.4 (It includes reformatted level data, and accompanying rendering and collision changes to handle the new levels as text files, as generated by the level editor I have been working on in the mean time.)

I think I have found the issue... It seems that Sachiho... doesn't have the sprite used for that animation, and I somehow just never noticed?

Notice near the bottom that Sachiho is missing a sprite that Miria has. I suspect finding (or making?) one to fill that spot would fix this issue.

"... was this ... ?"
"it was" is the grammatically-correct way to answer your question affirmatively. Could sound suggestive (like perhaps they on-boarded new developers, or died), but it's just politeness

last update here may be 2 years ago, but last update on Patreon is April 1st 2026, which COULD be a joke but I doubt it

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer." just randomly while you're playing. Don't get cocky!

我正在使用翻譯服務——如有任何誤解，敬請諒解…

不，我不能。

{:mode=>:locked}

MY GOD

Okay so the issue is the empty party member slot (not party member 1 or 2, but 3), it's occupied by a dummy character whose only attribute is they're still locked and unusable. So probably the easiest way to fix this is to skip healing party members who are locked lol

For a look into the debugging process, the important text here is

The method named :* with args [10] doesn't exist on [NilClass, NilClassFalseClass].

(The keywords being the method name, its args, and what it's supposed to exist on. So here, I'm apparently multiplying nil by 10 for some reason.)

And even more important, the "backtrace" pointing at line 201 in the "enemies.rb" file, which is

char.health = 40 + char.hp_level * 10

Which implies that when the game checks "char.hp_level", it gets back "nil", meaning mostly likely this isn't getting set. This is weird because all the characters are supposed to have an HP level, it should be 0, 1, 2, or 3 (meaning they have collected 0, 1, 2, or 3 HP upgrades, which means their max health is 40, 50, 60, or 70)

So the solution is some rigorous debugging to figure out exactly why the hp level seems to be missing

Primarily "no" because no such android version originally existed- this is a simulation of a software that existed in the past and is difficult to access now. An android port is far outside the scope of this particular page.

In the future, I plan on expanding upon the foundation here, but until multiple prerequisites are established (like a working level editor for one) I cannot in good conscience work significantly on this project- after all, it's basically 100% there.

Is it possible that one of the characters in your party (that isn't the active party member) got hurt before picking up the food item? The menu opens to show them healing up, and I recently got a crash related to some timing nonsense with that. If your issue is the same, I could actually push out the bugfix this moment! (Otherwise I'll have to research more to find what's wrong)

As in, access to the original Java program?

If you check the Project EverDriven discord (mod community for Echidna Wars DX) I got a little help from the community there. In short, install an old browser (Pale Moon), refuse to update Java to the latest version, add "https://d-gate.sakura.ne.jp/mini_wars/game.html" to Java's whitelist so that it'll run anyways, and visit said URL. Give it a minute, and the game should come alive after a heck of a lot of loading.

This page should help with the process, too.

The fix is implemented. (Had more time before a certain commitment today than I thought.)

Give it a try now!

Oh, I see! In effect, this error is saying "an entity is being assigned an animation state they don't have", so I am 99% sure what's happening- the level-end crystal is being given something incorrect and causing the issue. Then, when closing the console, the game continues as normal, having skipped the "load crystal" routine, so you enter the empty area where there should be a crystal, but it's missing. Since level completion is tied to destroying that crystal instead of any loading zone, this means the levels are unbeatable right now... whoops!!!

I will have this fixed by the end of the day tomorrow- gimme like 24 hours

Ahh, that's DragonRuby's console. It sounds like something broke and it's trying to tell you what's wrong. Could you share the entire contents of the console screen? It should include an error message which would help me fix whatever broke.

Or, you accidentally hit one of the keys that opens the console...? Try hitting the `/~ key to close it.

But otherwise, thanks for checking out my videogame!!

As a reminder, consider all links in the comments to be scams. If I WERE making an update to this game which required a new itch.io page, I'd put it in the description, not a comment, because I have access to the page description lol

(And I AM working on another update to this, which should bring it significantly further in line with the original project)

Now that is some funny etymology

This post is in celebration of 1,000 Windows executable downloads (we're at 2.2k total downloads so I missed important milestones there)

My previous projects had gotten a couple hundred interactions at best before, this level of sustained attention is new to me lmao

"Echidna Wars DX" is still purchaseable from D-Gate's DLSite page, right here for less than $10 (although the price fluctuates with the exchange rate between USD and Japanese Yen)

"Echidna Wars Mini" is technically still accessible at this website, but you need to use an old third-party website and tell Java not to care about security in order to get it running, which is altogether too many obstacles for me to be happy with, which is why I made this project (and continue to perfect it).

If you're looking to mod Echidna Wars DX, you will want to obtain a copy legitimately first, and then visit the EverDriven discord server, where EverDriven is an overhaul mod for Echidna Wars DX, and the members there can help you mod your game.

Re: Point 2, enemies healing very quickly. I checked the code, they SHOULD (excluding unforeseen consequences) heal 1 hitpoint every 32-60 frames (depending on their eating animation lengths, a shorter animation means quicker healing), WHICH IS once to twice per second (it's the worm that heals every 32 frames, and I could probably artificially slow that animation down to take 48 frames instead...?)

Is it ACTUALLY true that enemies take half damage once they have captured a player character? It really limits your DPS- if it's not true, that'd get you double the friend-saving DPS and make Mirea plenty effective at saving characters.