holy-doggo01 2022-10-03 18:12
Wow, the concept is sooo cool! I always loved games about submarines! Though I found controlling the submarine very hard.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Lost Depths
By ventuscaclium, Bulix, MidnitePixel_, Patrick Allred, Legitamte and JackMonaghan
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 952 | 3.13 | 24 | |
| Fun | 1108 | 2.68 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 561 | 3.34 | 24 | |
| Theme | 567 | 3.66 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 782 | 3.31 | 24 | |
| Audio | 457 | 3.36 | 24 | |
| Humor | 849 | 2.33 | 20 | |
| Mood | 419 | 3.61 | 24 |
Wow, the concept is sooo cool! I always loved games about submarines! Though I found controlling the submarine very hard.
very fun with good gameplay
The controls are difficult, a cause might be that it is pretty hard to have a feeling of speed and direction. Adding something that displays the current speed might help. Some kind of compass might also help.
Congrats, awesome idea !
The music and the dark environment gives the game a very good atmosphere. I could unfortunately not find any treasures, but I enjoyed myself regardless. I also found the scanning effect on the environment very cool.
Great job guys! :smiley:
The first minutes I tried to swim to the surface, because this is the first thing I saw, then restarted and realized that I was wrong 🌚
Very cool atmosphere and style, however some kind of a compass will improve experience a lot (got lost in the dark cave, somehow ended up near the entrance). But I liked it, awesome!
The controls really had me struggling. I hated it, but I loved it - not being able to see your surroundings in the way you presented it... it was very cool! Solid entry. My thalassophobia was totally fine with it 😅
For a jam game I would say its better than average! Im already a fan of 3D games and this one gets me specially Subnautica! it really gives me the vibes of it. Nice work dude
I have lots to say about this game. Some of it's good, some of it is not so good. I want to preface this by saying I do not want you to think that I disliked your game, or that it was somehow bad. On the contrary, this is one of the most ambitious, awesome projects I have seen, but with a few major problems I think get in the way of making it something amazing.
I'll first start with the good. Your atmosphere in this game is unrivaled. I've played a lot of game jam games, and I don't think I've found any that are quite like this. Somehow you manage to capture a haunting, lonely, terrifying feeling from such a simple concept. The fear of the ocean/exploration/unknown is something that is so hauntingly scary and you do a wonderful job of capturing that here. Everything is so immersive, whether that be through the display indicators, the radar, the submarine light, or being inside the submarine.
The scale of your game is absolutely massive. The map feels endless, and the cities are so cool. I love how the underwater city just blends into the environment and works so well to make the game feel natural. The radar really compliments the game as well. It's a really cool concept to only be able to know what's around you every 10 seconds. It's quite unnerving to think you know where you're going, but only for sure once the radar light turns on.
As far as some of the bad things go, direction and control are major flaws I think this game suffers from. I'll talk about each individually.
Having complicated controls is not a bad thing in video games. In fact, in can be quite rewarding to master a complex control scheme. Unfortunately, in this case complex is not good. Most things felt clunky, if not outright bad to control. Specifically, accelerating and decelerating, resetting, and turning left and right. When accelerating, you would have to press space to go in the direction you were facing. When decelerating, rather than stopping, there would be a force applied in the opposite direction of your accelerating (I think?). This made me quit using the deceleration feature and only reset to stop. When I was turning left or right, I felt like the roll should not have changed, and yet it did. I would have to compensate by turning while rolling, which was very uncomfortable. When I was first playing, I assumed you needed to navigate through the underwater cities, which led me to crash into many things because I thought I could fit. Controls being easy to pick up in a game jam game is essential. If a player does not feel like they can control the game, they are going to quit rather quickly.
As far as direction goes, I am not referring to the actual direction of travel, but rather the player's sense of "what am I supposed to do?". I felt that there was very little in the game to tell you what to do except for "go find treasure". On my first attempt at playing, I was trying to get acclimated to the controls which pretty much resulted in my flying around into nothingness. I reset the game and on my second attempt all I did was traverse the closest structures to you. I had no clue what I was supposed to be looking for other than "treasure". On my third attempt, I finally thought to myself, "the radar feature is pretty prominent, maybe I should actually attempt to use it", which led to me discovering a cave and finding the treasure.
I ended up getting 3/10 treasures on that attempt, after about half an hour of playing. (I never found the monster).
With all that being said, do not be discouraged at all by what I have to say. The fact is, I'm writing so much about this because I see a lot of potential in this. The mood, audio, and visuals are phenomenal but the game design and fun are very much lacking. When it comes to game jams, the most important thing is to have a quick hook and easy to understand gameplay. I'm definitely not one to talk, and struggle from this a lot myself as well, but I feel like it's such an important thing that often gets overlooked. (Congrats on being my longest comment ever, I maxed the character limit)
Thank you for your great writeup @mateu! I'm glad you enjoyed it, at least somewhat! A few notes:
I played around a lot with the controls and I knew they could have been made better but this was what I stuck with for the final version, I wanted to keep it the way it was for traversal reasons and because it felt the best to me over the others I tried. This was also one of the first times I've tried to make a game with completely 3D movement, so it came out a little rough...
We thought about having a compass or a 2D radar that also sent out a pulse to where treasures were on your sub HUD to help give direction, but I ran out of time and couldn't implement it. I was really hoping I would be able to.
@mateu Hey there! I just wanted to say thanks for that huge critique, these are all issues we discussed and simply ran out of time to innovate or improve on. Most importantly I'm just glad to hear the atmosphere and theme stood out to you! For several of us it was our first game jam and this was a big learning experience, so any good feedback is a win for me!
I don’t know if I made it clear enough, but I wouldn’t write that much if I didn’t think there was something worth writing about. There was something in your game that made it special enough to make me want to write about it, and that is a huge accomplishment. I really hate leaving comments that seem negative or are very critique-y, so I really don’t want you to interpret it as that.
@mateu not at all, we were all genuinely happy to read your review. Even if it had several criticisms they were all constructive, helpful, and ones I already agreed with. Also, our game stuck with you enough to even bother making such a long comment and that's a compliment in itself!
@arscene / @holy-doggo01 / @whoaitsjeff Our main dev was swamped so we didn't have time to improve it but we agree the sense of speed and controls are an issue.
Thanks to all of you for playing!
@rendow Thanks! Really glad you enjoyed the game, sorry to hear you couldn't find any treasure though!
@rexagon I love the idea of a nautical 3D compass, if we touch the project again I'll make that happen. Thanks for playing!
@zioxindiedev I'm glad you got Subnautica vibes! That was a big part of my inspiration for the art direction
Fun and cool!
Interesting approach. I like 360 deg explorators (space/underwater). It's kind of hard to see what's happening around you and what is a treasure. The controls are pretty intuitive though it's hard to tell at what speed you're moving at. Anyway, good try 👍
Nicely Done Bro. really nice concept and use of the 10 second theme. Would love to see this game developed further and released in a larger scale. The game really give a nice overall look. Can find a bit incomplete but then again its a Jam game so, its great anyways. Overall good job great efforts. Please do check out my submission as well.
Extremely cool game. Navigating the tunnels from pulse to pulse felt really cool, and there is some really nice atmosphere. Your orientation being tied to your propulsion is interesting because it adds difficulty to the pitch black navigation, but if that were the route you're trying to take there's definitely some tuning to be done, since the failure state for the navigation is kind of just pinballing through the tunnel for a bit. All in all though a very cool game!
@georgy16 / @adriangray / @baylock / @animawish I'm glad you all liked the game! I agree with your comments that it's missing some better 3D navigation and speed indicators, it's something we didn't get to add. But most importantly, thanks for playing our game!