FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD57 → What Lurks Below

What Lurks Below

By dxk2294 and jacobingalls

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall164.4062
Fun354.2062
Innovation1893.7062
Theme94.5562
Graphics844.4262
Audio184.3160
Humor3433.0449
Mood124.4760

Comments

bashem 2025-04-08 03:14

Hey there! Great work! I just wish the progression was a bit faster, especially at the beginning.

zigtalk 2025-04-08 03:32

Love the aesthetic and moodiness of this one. Great work!

pandalk 2025-04-08 03:47

Finished the game! it took quite a long time to start, and I didn't realise you could scroll down for a while, but when you start getting a bunch of upgrades, it becomes much faster, cool mood overall, congrats

noodlehoof 2025-04-08 04:32

love the aesthetic, and i'm a sucker for a mindless clicker/upgrade game. absolutely killer game

dzr118 2025-04-08 04:32

A very beautiful game, the sound is also really well done. I wish there was some way to automate some of the clicking, maybe I didn't get far enough to encounter the upgrades others are mentioning.

jacobingalls 2025-04-08 04:45

@dzr118 Yep! You can automate the clicking (and more :sweat_smile: ) by scrolling down and unlocking the first level. Once you have people, you can assign them to mine *substance* or collect it.

arkansaslover 2025-04-08 04:51

Good job. The pixel art and sound are great. I wasn't aware I could scroll to go deeper until I saw you mention it in the comments here. Now that I know, I'm keen to find out what lurks below.

reed-molbak 2025-04-08 04:53

I love the art! The beginning's a bit slow, but once I got going I enjoyed it.

justine-olshan 2025-04-08 04:54

Wait what happened at the end?! I was about to buy an upgrade and then...!

That was fun especially when it really started going!

bearcage 2025-04-08 05:02

I had a blast with this one, sunk half an hour and beat it!

Like the others, I wish the initial ramp up to "you don't _have_ to click anymore" was a little quicker, but overall this was a great entry. Quite polished, too.

Thanks for sharing your game!

villeloso 2025-04-08 05:06

Impressive, audio, visuals, animations, everything. Incredible work

profit 2025-04-08 05:22

Well that was a good use of an hour or so. yah once you get the automation going you can walk away come back and get everything ;)

Nice clicker game. I had to play it all the way to the end!?....no spoilers from me.

morepixels 2025-04-08 07:08

Amazingly beautiful game with such engaging and interesting mechanics. Absolutely LOVED the atmosphere of it, a stunning game that I'd love to see polished and turned into a full thing! The ending is incredible!

A minor note but I wish it mentioned you could scroll haha. I almost bought all the houses without ever scrolling down haha

blue-pin-studio 2025-04-08 08:17

I stuck around all the way until the ending! So cool, you did an amazing job! No nitpicks from me :)

potatobrain 2025-04-08 15:24

love the aesthetics and sound design of the game, really solid idle game 👌! [Screenshot 2025-04-08 172258.png](///raw/3d6/55/z/6b6c9.png) just encountered like some precision or overflow error

relictooth 2025-04-09 00:30

Really great take on an incremental game, its still playing in the background as I type this. I love the the pixel art, the audio, and just the overall aesthetic of the game, very well done!

*update* - I finished it and wow, that was a great experience.

timelost 2025-04-09 01:36

Great work, the art style is fantastic I love the contrast between the resources and everything else. The game is fun. The story is interesting. Overall the game is fantastic.

python-b5 2025-04-09 01:40

Loved the aesthetic of this! The small amount of story added as the game progressed was also a great addition. As for the gameplay - the progression at the start of the game was a little awkwardly slow. The main bottleneck was definitely collecting the substance. I was _extracting_ a lot of it, but it was far more than I could collect. While the numbers suddenly exploded in size toward the end of the game, my desire to unlock all upgrades kept the pace slow. By the time I finally got to completing the final section, I had so much substance I could buy everything nearly instantly. I think the pace of this game would be massively improved by offering some more ways to increase collection speed. Even at the _very end_ of the game, manually holding my mouse down still offered a significant increase in yield, which is uncommon in idle games.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed this! The ambience is on point, and the transition from quiet and slow to loud and fast-paced was done well. Nice work.

xpoho 2025-04-09 05:25

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Such a good and well balanced game. Very good work!

flying-butter-studio 2025-04-09 07:10

Incredible, I have nothing more to say. Addictive and interesting from the point of view of the descriptions of the improvements that bring lore. Congratulations on this great achievement! :heart:

freamdev 2025-04-09 09:44

Shocked at the level of polish the game have, the story was pretty captivating. The blue orb system was a bit harder to understand and the endgame spiraled out of controll really fast. But early to midgame was a great experience.

nondev 2025-04-09 18:13

Really enjoyed this and was surprised how much the mechanics grew. The tooltips cracking open the lore was great. Only small thought is maybe could've done with being able to click-drag to also pan up and down, since the scroll was a little slow. Had a lot of fun, great stuff.

thatsommes 2025-04-09 19:10

I do love incrementals! How did you know? Screenshot 2025-04-09 210936.png

thisyc 2025-04-10 01:47

Nicely done! The art, sound design come together and I really like the atmosphere you are creating. The beginning is a bit slow, but once I got into the story it became really fun!

jcourt 2025-04-10 10:33

As others have said, the atmosphere is really great! This is one of the better incremental games I've seen, especially from a game jam. I really appreciate the descriptions for all the things you can buy - they really help with the theming.

tkap1 2025-04-10 16:28

Awesome game. A little too slow in the beginning.

rack47 2025-04-11 01:48

This is very polished for a game jam. The late game ramped up in speed very quickly for me, which was fun. Nicely done!

dhim 2025-04-11 23:02

I stop at 1000 water and situla XC because there was not much to do at the point... So I have missed the ending it seems! Great game though, the best jam so far for me.

I wanted to add your repository to my list of [Ld 57 Github Repository](https://github.com/stars/dhmmasson/lists/ludum-dare-57-compo), but your seems to be inaccessible, have you made a private repository ?

You can add the following badges to your readme

```md Ludum Dare Ludum Dare ```

and use these **topics** to make your Ludum Dare entry more discoverable: - `game` - `game-development` - `ludum-dare` - `ludumdare` - `ludumdare57` - `ludum-dare-57` - `ld57`

mireyu 2025-04-12 11:05

Nice idle game. At first I was worried there would be no ending, but I was pleasantly suprised, when it popped up. Especially the overall atmosphere hits the point and the light pillars are very satisfying to watch :)

deformhead 2025-04-12 14:39

I somehow need a :cookie: now...

Capture d'écran 2025-04-12 163632.png

Really good game, so many items to buy and features! OK, it is slow at the beginning, but I think a full game like this is hard to balance well from early to end game.

Personnaly I had issues with the scrolling (I'm a Windows user, so I guess this is the eternal pain of scrolling issues between Mac and PC).

:clap:

holysparks 2025-04-12 20:42

Great entry, pushing the storytelling envelope for the idle/clicker genre

lordsheo 2025-04-13 01:23

this is such a polished experience with gorgeous everything, I do love incremental games and this was such a good one. Well done.

texugo 2025-04-13 01:35

Wow, this is amazing. Great graphics, gameplay and narrative!

adamsmccall 2025-04-13 02:14

Yo what did I just play

The atmosphere is so well done I was scared to click on some of the latest upgrades. Straight up 5/5

catusfelony 2025-04-13 02:15

This was awesome! I don't think I've ever played an incremental game where I could actually see so visually how upgrades affected the environment. It kept me hooked the whole way through!

hijomo 2025-04-13 05:33

I really enjoy incremental games, this was fun, I liked the ideas and dark nature.

abymajesty 2025-04-13 08:57

Such a cool game, I loved playing it, I was a little disappointed that we couldn't go deeper, and the ending was pleasantly unexpected

grizeldi 2025-04-13 12:34

Didn't expect a clicker game to come out of this jam, but when you thinkg about it, it's a perfect fit. The game's audio-visual presentation and mood is superb, but the gameplay could do with some proper explaining.

It's not obvious at all what needs to be done in order to collect the mined particles at the start and I'd have given up on the game if there wasn't a helpful comment on itch explaining the collectors to someone who had the exact same issue as me. Later in the game I faced another "what now" problem, as I unlocked all the upgrades in the depths and had no idea what to do now, as I didn't have the cathedral built nor unlocked at all yet, so maybe some hint what needs to be done would also come handy there.

Minor annoyances aside, a really good LD entry!

ln404 2025-04-13 13:34

изображение_2025-04-13_163413181.png

Thank you! It was really fun!

mikeliosus 2025-04-13 16:28

Monosnap What Lurks Below by JamesKelly - Google C.png

Nice Clicker/Idler! Well polished! Good job!

ammonit 2025-04-15 10:33

The intro — the sound work is a masterpiece! A very unusual game, lots of cool solutions — awesome!

charin 2025-04-15 21:17

Credit yourself in-game! A small YouTuber I watch just covered it, but because you're not credited on the title screen or a credits screen, viewers don't know who made it just by watching (he linked to your itch.io in the description). It's a fun game, let people know you made it!

cataclysmicknight 2025-04-15 22:37

That was a really interesting, dark, wild ride! I love incremental games, and while there were a couple of moments where things seemed to particularly slow down, there were also several times when things skyrocketed and ​​NUMBERS WENT UP!​​​

This was a fantastic game, let alone that it was made in 72 hours! 😮 And you really captured the vibe via the music, sound effects, and art.

borabee 2025-04-16 17:03

It's not easy to balance an idle game in a jam - I know because I've tried and also I've played many poorly balanced clickers in jams. But I think you did a really good job here. Although it gets a little fast by the end, the entire gameplay remains fun and engaging till the end, especially since you've managed to create a really nice atmosphere and story to go with it. Plus, graphics and audio are also top tier.

A fez nitpicks: there really should be an end to situla!! Otherwise I feel like I missed some awesome plot twist by not sticking at upgrading it. Also, the controls explanation at the beginning is a bit confusing, especially for the collectors. What does the round backwards arrow mean? Other than that the UI is very nice!

tsaot 2025-04-17 02:53

That is a great clicker! I loved the story progression in it.

perrin 2025-04-19 12:27

Really enjoyed this played it through to the end. There's a bit in the middle where it drags a little when getting new population is super expensive but once it accelerates again it really picks up towarsd the end. The looks and polish of it all was great too.

deadbydeath 2025-04-19 12:50

Wow this game was marvelous. I loved the music!

missfire 2025-04-22 13:16

An intriguing and atmospheric clicker! The visuals are pleasant, and the music fits nicely too.

I especially liked the eerie tone — it gave off a kind of Lovecraftian hopelessness by the end, and I loved that.

If I had one piece of feedback, it’s about the pacing. If we plotted it out, it would look like an exponential curve: a very slow, gradual start, and then a huge spike right at the end. I’d suggest making the early part a bit more dynamic to give players a sense of progress, then slowing it down again before ramping up for the finale.

That said, I’m really happy I played through to the end. Thank you so much for your work!

jacky-san 2025-04-22 14:45

So satisfying game with great gfx, sfx & music ! :heart:

unitedfailures 2025-04-22 15:42

I've played some great idle games this jam, but this was by far my favorite! The art and atmosphere were great! I enjoyed how the game is pretty well balanced as you're ramping up, until you start unlocking point multipliers and you just go super sonic lolll. That's always my favorite part of idlers.

Great work, yall!

tygrak 2025-04-22 17:44

Very nicely polished, it just didn't even feel like a game jam game! The art is so nice. I don't really play idle games usually so not sure if it's common or not, but I also liked how you made the upgrades be located in a different "space" that you need to grow out to making it fit nicely with the theme.

langit 2025-04-22 21:54

This was really fun. I loved reading the upgrades to get an idea of what I was really doing, and me being a villain with so many resources at my fingertips, just kept buying upgrades not caring what the cost of those upgrades were. maybe we're all villains, who love to see numbers going up not caring about the cost. Great work you guys!

maxdrago 2025-04-23 11:38

Great game! Great graphics, soundtrack, and it's a pleasure to play.

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