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Deep Below Ground
Deep Below Ground
By v0idpointer
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 503 | 3.39 | 25 | |
| Fun | 352 | 3.47 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 686 | 2.78 | 25 | |
| Theme | 598 | 3.34 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 656 | 3.06 | 25 | |
| Audio | 574 | 2.82 | 25 | |
| Humor | 232 | 3.04 | 25 | |
| Mood | 737 | 2.68 | 24 | |
Comments
lehaine
2021-04-26 16:45
A nice little game. I ended up going to level 52 before I stopped. Not sure how long it goes or if it goes on forever. The spells are great. I used all the spell books. I ended up sticking with fire the most because I was running out of mana very fast with the other three. I liked the light book best though. The fire eyeball spell was OP. Not sure if there was supposed to be a cooldown on it or not but I was able to use it in almost every room :). It would get stuck on the white chests though for some reason.
The art looks good and the sounds were great. I liked the little backstory to it as well. I enjoyed playing it. Great job!
The backstory is pretty funny, I liked that part. Some comments:
1. I feel like the game itself isn't quite challenging enough. It feels too similar for the most part 2. It takes quite a long time for the magic bar to refill 3. This is minor, but it's hard to see the wizard enemy's attacks in the room with the purple floor
I do like the different attacks that the player can use though, and I also find it cool how some slimes have different gameplay mechanics, especially the ice slime who reflects your attacks and freezes you.
Well done. I really appreciate the in-game tutorials! Sound was a little loud, but kudos for including sound effects. This is a fairly robust game!
goutye
2021-04-27 12:29
Had some great fun playing it and getting deeper and deeper with new spells! I was literally invincible and my favorite was the light-based spells! :v: Congratulations on the game :fireworks:
train27
2021-04-27 19:28
I feel like, for a game like this with such a focus on its **magic spells**, they are pretty much what make or break the experiencie.
:heavy_check_mark: There is **variety**, two (three, taking into account the "*finisher*") spells for each book, with four books, for a total of 12 spells. The texts are funny, and it's nice that each book specializes on one way of fighting.
The **movement feels nice**, the character doesn't slip or get stuck anywhere, and its movement is fast :runner:.
Programmer art never gets old, and the best thing about is it can only get better :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.
:x: It starts getting **repetitive** very fast, it gets to a point where every room is just a wizard, two-three chests, and two-five blobs of different colors.
The fast movement and spell-based combat seemed to be indicative of a fast-paced action, but the enemies move so slow and there's just two kinds of them (*I know the slimes have "elemental" typings of sorts, but in the end a slime is a slime*) that it turns into something a bit tedious.
Sometimes the **spells wouldn't activate**, even when I had more than enough mana. Or so I though at least. Maybe it could be nice to slightly change the color of the spell button whenever you have enough mana to cast it :thinking: , since there are no (visible) numbers given to the player.
The ice book's second spell only works sometimes for me, and I don't see anything happening on screen :slight_frown:
I love the idea of an infinite game which still has a compelling backstory. The way the narrative is interwoven is pretty great. The spells are pretty responsive and fun to use, I love games which let you experiment with their systems.
If I had to change one thing, it's that I think you should try and make a version of the game which is playable in the web. I had to download a Java IDE to play the game, but I didn't mind since it was fun!
First off all... This gets my certified Java stamp of approval. It is very brave to build something like this from scratch in only two days. People will often underestimate this and I actually really enjoyed it...
This has mid 90's vibes for me, it takes me back. The artwork supports that and the gameplay feels natural, well done. As mentioned before it tends to get a little bit repetitive but in the end, this was made in 2 days guys, amazing work !
jogy34
2021-04-30 04:03
Nice game, it was fun to play. That the concept was cool, I liked being able to use different spells against different type of monsters. Could have used a larger variety of rooms though. Would also have been cool to be able to use the collected gems to buy upgrades from a shop every so many floors or something like that. The graphics were nice though I did think the character's movement animation was a bit funny with the arms moving but not the legs. Nice job overall though!
I did run into a few problems with the game. Open chests blocked bullets which made it an issue when the wizards would run on top of them. Also, if there was a potion on the floor and you hit the 'F' key and weren't on top of the potion it would completely freeze the game (probably crashed but the window stayed open).
The worst issue, however, was that it took up a massive amount of ram and would keep lagging every couple of seconds. Just speculation but if you're running a game loop as fast as you can that might be the problem. If that's the case, you may want to sleep at the end of each loop for a few milliseconds which you could calculate to try to hit a target fps. I used to make games without an engine and that's something that I did when I first started but a memory issue like what I was seeing could be caused by any number of things so that's just a shot in the dark from my own experience.
Fun game! I really enjoyed trying out the variety of spells. The game was very easy, especially for an infinite game. I only died when I was dying on purpose. However, I have to give credit where credit is due. There's a lot of content here, and lot of good writing. Pretty much all the spellbook descriptions got a laugh out of me.
I should note, you can pause the game and spam your weapon AND your mana still recharges, allowing you to build up a bunch of spells to all fire when unpaused. This was, of course, extremely fun. ZA WARUDO!
jrevel
2021-04-30 08:24
Well done, doing such a game from scratch must have been quite a challenge ! I like it a lot, you managed to put a lot of content, with such fun descriptions... Of course the gameplay could be improved a bit, I never felt really challenged because the ennemies are not really aggressive and the spells are really powerful, but the fact that you add new spells from time to time manage to keep my interest. Great entry overall !
Congratulations on the game, you have in your hands a beautiful stone that if it is well polished will become a beautiful jewel, as there are already many things going on, such as art and charisma in the characters, working better on the mechanics of the enemies and the progression of difficulty will have an addictive game, but at the moment the imbalance is great I went from level -30 without having to change weapons, there came a time when I was so used to the same difficulty not to become monotone I started to propose challenges to kill 1 o mage without hitting anyone, this is a suggestion each level you have to fulfill a different mission to move to the next level, a big hug, and I await your evaluations regarding my game.
tutorials! nice job! really enjoyed this entry and hope you contiue to work on it further!
Super fun game. i got tolike 34 and was testing out whether you could interact physically with the wizards. Seemed like it was great, but then... he plastedme with a spell and i insta died. Some hesitation on engine dropping frames from time to time was annoying, but enjoyed it!
I had trouble running it on my end but I really like the concept!
This was quite an ambitious game for a jam! Each spell had a lot of thought put into it, and the game had more to it than there initially seems. I think the art is alright, but animations are clunky and could use work. I think music could have helped a lot, and the sounds are a bit rough, often feeling jarring. The gameplay itself is neat but could use polish to really bring it to life. Overall this was still a lot of fun and a good entry!
I had a good amount of fun playing this--I kept playing far past the point where it became quite repetitive. Even though there isn't too much variety in the enemies, there is enough variety in the spells that I found it worthwhile to try them all out, and to try swapping between them more often or less often, etc...
One thing I really appreciate about the game is how much detail it gives about how to play it. It was super easy to play just because of how clearly annotated everything in the game is, and that's despite it having quite a few different mechanics. It's often pretty hard to learn how to play a jam game that has as many mechanics as this but this game was super smooth to pick up and play.
In terms of the gameplay, I definitely liked the different weaknesses that the spells targeted. It is quite obvious which enemies have what weaknesses. What I find interesting about that, is that I often don't take advantage of systems involving different enemy weaknesses, simply because I don't care to learn which enemies have what weaknesses. I think broadcasting the weaknesses so clearly, like they are here, can be nice. It allowed me to choose rather at random whether I wanted to fight the enemies more effectively be swapping to the best weapon.
A boring note: I think music is the biggest missing component here. Music adds so much atmosphere to a game. I'm sure that's an obvious point, but this is the first game I've really felt it missing... the game is so engaging otherwise that I think a bit more sound, but especially music, would really make it pop.
Overall: A rather small game, becomes repetitive, but has enough variety in content to keep me playing for quite a while. Nice entry.
Very fun game! I liked switching between all the elements to do the best elemental damage. One thing I noticed is that mana will still regenerate when in the menu for switching spells even though the enemies are paused. Great job overall!