FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD48 → In Too Deep

In Too Deep

By joeshanahan, AmyE123, Scott Richards and Tash Briggs

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall9873.4723
Fun13543.0423
Innovation15612.7123
Theme7573.7623
Graphics4744.0423
Audio1
Humor12802.1920
Mood15272.9523

Comments

maybeagoose 2021-04-27 18:02

Very good but I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to jump into the portal

his-games 2021-04-27 18:03

cool art style, and it feels super satisfying to play. Very well done!

burnerreborn 2021-04-27 18:04

I think this game was very fun, it really feels like were going deeper and deeper so full marks for the theme, and ofc the Art. very good

js 2021-04-27 18:08

This game is amazing. The graphics, the UI, animations, effects, the amount of content, level transitions, fitting music,... everything is so well polished. Great job, that's all I can say.

tim4 2021-04-27 18:08

Cute game, but collecting of resources too slow. Anyway nice game!

turegrappa 2021-04-27 18:14

Wow, cute game! I love all about it. Sometimes I get stuck in the texture of level two and three.

duvey 2021-04-27 18:14

You made a fun little game! It's got a great vibe and takes a lot of cool mechanics from other games. It's a little slow up front, maybe have some easy upgrade early on to reward the player? Also, the bombs are almost impossible to aim. Great work in a weekend!

alina-baybulatova 2021-04-27 18:16

Soo nice character) I really have fun to play this game! Thank you)

scott-redrup 2021-04-27 18:19

It's an interesting idea for a game, I like the art style a lot and those green cube enemies look somewhat familiar! For some reason I got really bad performance on my laptop.. not sure what's going on there. I agree with the others collecting resources is a little slow and it's not clear how you jump down to the next cave. Well done on finishing.

joeshanahan 2021-04-27 18:31

Thanks everyone for the feedback so far! I completely agree that the beginning is far too slow, we were putting the levels together right until the last minute so we didn't actually get to play the game ourselves until the next morning after we'd woken up :sweat_smile:

That's also why there are a few issues like a repeated level somewhere, and that one of the ores doesn't drop anything. This is our first time trying to make a game like this where you progress incrementally by getting a bit further each time, so definitely learned a lot for next time!

guladam 2021-04-27 18:32

Great work! I really liked the style of the graphics, and the gameplay felt relaxing. I believe it's great that you had the time to create all this mechanics and graphics in this time frame, so congratulations. :smile:

The only thing that seemed weird to me was the UI in the corners (it had a 3D effect of some kind?). :pick:

joeshanahan 2021-04-27 18:34

Yeah, there's a chromatic aberration effect that is stronger on some tilesets more than others. It would've been better if we worked out how not to have the postprocess stack apply to the UI but not enough time...

Also for performance, I have a pretty old laptop and it seemed to run okay except for on the lava levels. I'm surprised actually it did, because on some levels we have over 5000 ground tiles and no culling. Could definitely be improved!

eugenik 2021-04-27 20:07

really liked it.

kontiko 2021-05-02 12:52

I really liked you're game the controls are really good maybe a little hint for going deeper. I didn't figured out how i can leave the cave maybe i didn't go deep enough i forgot because my pc was on mute the music and sound effects are fitting the game really great

joeshanahan 2021-05-02 13:12

@kontiko Ah, should've made it clearer but you hold down the button in the top right to leave the cave. I didn't want people to accidentally click it if they didn't want to leave, but I think that ended up being unclear in the end. Thanks for playing :smile:

mighty-mufflon-games 2021-05-03 09:48

Impressive! Ore collecting, little fights, crafting/upgrade and shop. The graphics are adorable. Good choice of music.

lmb 2021-05-04 00:06

The game is very pretty, graphics and animations are really nice. Sound worked well, too. Execution overall I'd say is good. It is well-polished and bug-free.

My biggest gripe is that the game felt extremely grindy to me. The amount of busywork I have to do for each "unit of satisfaction" I get is too high. I see you added portals and drills to the game (perhaps to mitigate that), but I only managed to get them after a good deal of time playing.

Other smaller notes:

* Combat didn't feel very satisfying. I few times I managed to hit-and-run until I killed an enemy without getting hurt. But most often I was just clicking as fast as I could. * I mistakenly clicked on "Quit" once and lost all my progress :slight_frown: * Took me some time to find out I had to click and hold to leave the cave.

joeshanahan 2021-05-04 07:22

@lmb Yeah you're totally right about it being grindy, we didn't have any time to balance it so what we submitted was a game we hadn't played ourselves from the start. Combat also ended up being very basic, with no real way to prevent yourself getting hurt.

As for the progress being lost, that sounds like a bug! Progress should be saved every time you change floor, and loaded again on startup. Really sorry you ran into that one, but thanks for giving the game a chance :smile:

lmb 2021-05-04 22:42

@joeshanahan

> As for the progress being lost, that sounds like a bug! Progress should be saved every time you change floor, and loaded again on startup.

Oh, I think I must apologize then! It was probably my mistake here! The state was probably saved as you said and I didn't notice it. When this happened I was not very far into the game, so I didn't had any upgraded equipment or placed any portals or anything that would stand out if the progress was saved. I just (unfairly!) assumed my progress was lost.

For what is worth, just tried the game again and my portal is still there :wink: (and this saving thing is a very nice touch, by the way!)

All the best for you and sorry again for being unfair!

curtis-pelissier 2021-05-05 16:32

That's a good moody game. I love the graphics and the music. But the farming is really slow. I played like 20 minutes to get the silver pickaxe. Maybe I'm bad, or the random is not by my side, but I found the "leveling" really long. Maybe a more exponential curve would be great?

The battles are a bit rigid, but it's ok for a jam game.

Good job for this game :thumbsup:

joeshanahan 2021-05-06 08:26

@curtis-pelissier Nah you're totally right, the progress curve is way too punishing especially at the early stages. Trying to get just enough stone for the first upgrade is super tedious on it's own, thanks for sticking with it all the way until silver!