LÖVE

The Great Miner is the game I'm working on, and there're snaps below. Here's the .love file:
.LOVE FILE
http://pan.baidu.com/s/1mgqqGVA

The basic operation is done, so you can give the game a try.
[escape] display the menu duration the game
[tab] display the inventory table
[w/a/s/d] move around the map
[mouse] work on the tile, enter the cave/dungeon, or hit animals/monsters

I'm here for:
1, I'm really upset about the appearance of the game , so I want so much your opinions and advices; I can program, but I dont know much about how to make the game art. And I find it difficult to just download images from the web to satisfy my need. How do you do the graphics work? (by the way, I kind of dont want pure pixel art =_=)
2, Text content of the game is written in Chinese originally, and recently I've translated it into English. But the translation is poor, pale and unsatisfactory. I would appreciate it so much if you can help me with the translation! (All the translation work is contained in the file 'language_en.lua', so it wont be a hard work if you're a native English speaker)

[Notice]
The game is saved automatically when you exit, but not yet durint the playing, neither if you click the 'close'' button of the window to exit the game.

I have never finished any game before, so I want your guidence so much. I'm waiting for your responses

last snap:

Löve Frames have a skinning feature. Can be used for menus and dialogs to greatly improve atmosphere of the game and to give a GUI more consistent look and feel.

arampl wrote:Löve Frames have a skinning feature. Can be used for menus and dialogs to greatly improve atmosphere of the game and to give a GUI more consistent look and feel.

Thanks~ That's exactly what I'm thinking about . But I want to improve the graphics quality firstly

Even better would be to wait improving graphics & music until you 100% sure that mechanics are good.

Because if mechanics are bad, best graphics & music will be no salvation for the game. They will hide the fact that the game is bad in its core.

Tynan Sylvester calls that "premature production". You can read about that in his "Designing games" book (about "grayboxes").

I planned to make a game combining tower defense element and survival element, but later I realized it's too complex for me to do that. So it's now just a survival game. I really haven't considered the game mechanism a lot yet, and I think it can be a difficult part of making this game. Lot of problems to be thought about, such as what all the items are meant to be used for, how the player can live but not too easily, how to make the player not to be annoyed to be killed. A lot of items of the game are currently useless, or not available to the player by normal game mechanisms . It's bad.
I'll surely make simpler games in the future after this one is done .
By the way, thanks for the book reccommendation!

Any chance you could upload this to a nicer website?