FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD57 → Sub-mersed

Sub-mersed

By aynu

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2812.7537
Fun2772.6237
Innovation2752.5537
Theme2013.2837
Graphics2283.0538
Audio2322.3934
Humor1622.6132
Mood2522.7835

Comments

icaka 2025-04-05 18:38

It says "not found" when i tried to download. I will wait to try your game :3

aynu 2025-04-06 04:28

I just updated it try itch.io page if this dosn't work :) @icaka

haokai-xu-1999 2025-04-07 14:35

Good work for a person who has just learnt for 1 month! Looking forward to your future games!

atsh 2025-04-07 16:30

Good for first effort I would actually not include the music. Also I didn't understand the small fishes are background - maybe make it more clear they are in the background Keep learning and I'm sure you'll improve

BTW, I needed to run it with a command line - not sure if there's a different way

aynu 2025-04-08 07:06

Thanks I never thought someone would like it!! 🥹

levi-kingma 2025-04-08 11:10

A very strong contender for winning, excellent submission!

follusior 2025-04-08 14:17

I like the mood of it all, but unfortunately I couldn't launch it.

xpoho 2025-04-08 16:09

изображение_2025-04-08_230819481.png

I would be ashamed if i didn'd run it. So I did! I run the game! Hooray!

Anyway, you are awesome ^_^

yibirabbit007 2025-04-08 17:05

Pygame? I used it back in high school, good luck!! Giving you a thumbs up!

andrewkennedy 2025-04-09 01:28

For your first game jam ever, especially after just 1 month of learning pygame, you should feel very proud to have a finished product. That's a big step to take!

As a fellow Python dev, I'll give you some advice on distributing your game. You need to build an executable or most people are not going to bother trying to play your game. I recommend [PyInstaller](https://pyinstaller.org/en/stable/). DaFluffyPotato has a good video that explains the process specifically for pygame: [Making an Executable from a Pygame Game (PyInstaller)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTxaran0Cig)

Looking at your project folder, I'm also taking a guess that you are not familiar with virtual environments or the `requirements.txt` convention for specifying dependencies. This is useful for maintaining a consistent development environment, and also sort of helps solve the distribution problem (although anyone who isn't familiar with Python development won't get any use out of this). This is a great place to start learning about that: [Install packages in a virtual environment using pip and venv](https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/)

Good job and best of luck on your gamedev journey!

marcos-tulio-cavalcante 2025-04-09 12:48

I couldn't run it, I think I have to install some other software for this.

aynu 2025-04-09 13:17

You have to download python and pygame(optional)

henk 2025-04-09 21:44

The audio was a bit unpleasant, and it wasn't totally clear to me what the goal was. The grey fish appear to be enemies, but if I avoid them and let them go off the left-hand side of the screen they never come back. I've seen worse from people with more than a month's experience. Keep it up!

inferno123 2025-04-10 02:20

Not entirely sure of what the goal of the game and the music is a tad unpleasant but I like the graphics and the controls are very smooth. It's a great first game jam game!

Like other comments suggested, learning how to bundle your game to an executable would definitely help more people play it.

basekeet 2025-04-10 05:36

Wow, this is really impressive — especially considering you’ve only been learning Pygame for a month! Wishing you lots of success in the future.

As a suggestion, it would be nice to have more pleasant music, and maybe add a score system or some kind of goal to work toward.

aynu 2025-04-10 06:05

Thanks everyone for the feedback I have noted it all down and will make some changes later and it will be updated on itch.io when it will be ready as you all know I am new to pygame so this game might take 4 months to over 1 year to devlop but I will always keep learning thanks for rating me!

tiar 2025-04-10 06:58

Not sure if you're aware, but your game page on Itch got quarantined: Zrzut ekranu z 2025-04-10 08-45-07.png It's probably because you created a zip file wrong: your zip file with a source code and resources also contains a zip file with the source code and resources (so it's a zip file within a zip file).

aynu 2025-04-10 07:01

Ok i will fix it

makache 2025-04-10 07:17

Quite a good result considering this is your first LD.

sypiac 2025-04-10 08:46

Music inspired by crazy bus, I assume? Congrats on your first release!

ssiannas 2025-04-10 09:38

Good job on finishing your firt game! It's a great first step. I'll try to leave honest feedback.

* First of all, congrats on making a game with pygame! It was my first "game engine" too. As much as I love it though, sometimes it makes your life harder and not everyone has or will install python to run your game (or it gets flagged as suspicious) so it kinda limits the exposure your game will get. You can either try investing time in another game engine in the future OR you can continue learning python and how to use it to produce executables and webGL builds. (There are resources like [this](https://github.com/pygame-web)) * It's common practice in python to add a `requirements.txt` file which can be exported with `pip freeze > requirements.txt`. This will help other people using python install all the required dependencies for your game with `pip install -r requirements.txt`. This also pairs well with [virtual environemnts](https://realpython.com/python-virtual-environments-a-primer/) that help isolate code dependencies for each project. * You can try to give your game a story. Maybe even as text before the main game starts. Something as simple as "You must save the fish village from the demonic blackfish" would be enough to set a mood. * Some sort of score mechanic or end goal would really help motivate players to keep playing * Music was a bit loud, very short repetitive motiffs should be lower in volume unless it has some expressive purpose. Otherwise, it can get annoying

Congrats again on submitting for ludum dare! Keep 'em coming :D

Edit: I saw @andrewkennedy left super useful feedback too, you should check it out

aynu 2025-04-10 10:23

Thanks I really should improve my skills before the next ldjam thanks @ssiannas

ssiannas 2025-04-10 10:33

@aynu there's literally no ceiling for any of us. Learning is a process that never stops and events like ludum dare are amazing to accelerate it!

aynu 2025-04-10 12:20

Thanks alot

beebster-games 2025-04-10 14:36

The download has been flagged.

"Our system has flagged this page for additional review due to potential suspicious behavior from the page owner."

The page is quarantined by itch.io

aynu 2025-04-10 14:56

Yes it was quarentined because of a zip in a zip issue @beebstergames

perovic2018 2025-04-10 18:05

This type of music is my favorite it makes me actually do things) the coloring is very nice and little fishes r cuties. Good job, keep it up!

marudziik 2025-04-10 22:03

This is a great first attempt! PyGame CE is a very powerful library and definitely can be used professionally for game dev - continue to work on expanding you knowledge about it! You already got some great comments here. Don't worry too much about the deployment - while it's worth to aim for having Web versions, there are many capable people here, who are going to download and run Python, create local virtual env and run your game. It's good to learn everything down the path, but I'd suggest to focus on gamemaking first. I think there are good tutorials on YT (see Da FluffyPotato as an example).

From my side I'd suggest going simple first. Expand on your entry. As a start, you can add some sort of point tracker to the main screen. Consider end condition of the game - loose and/or win. Maybe allow the player to shoot left as well (unless this was a design choice). Work on your audio skills.

Gamedev is hard, but very rewarding. You're making your first steps in the right direction, well done!

Btw. you can edit the entry page and upload the zip without the zip inside it as well, I think.

gamescodedogs 2025-04-11 06:24

Pygame is still alive? Anyway, it's very brave to go straight to the compo with your first game. This is a difficult test even for professionals. Good luck in further developing the game!

jamesgames1000 2025-04-12 18:48

@aynu It's nice to see another game in pygame!! But I do suggest doing what andrewkennedy said and the video he suggested is the best for making an exe I should know because I had to go through a bunch of videos to make an exe for the LD and only that one worked.

I noticed you stored duplicates of images that were flipped, but instead of storing those extra images you can just do this:

PLAYER = py.image.load('Images/PLAYER.png').convert_alpha() PLAYER_RIGHT = py.transform.flip(PLAYER, True, False)

Explanation: PLAYER_RIGHT = py.transform.flip(PLAYER, True, False) The first input is the image, the second is flip horizontally and the third is flip vertically

This might be easier than flipping the images in MS paint or whatever you use and will also save space.

I'm not an expert so if anyone sees this and tells them selves this is worse than what he did please just tell me and aynu, I dont want to teach misinformation.

But all of that aside this is a great first entry. Keep up the good work :)

rubixnoob13 2025-04-24 08:03

I *REALLY* hope you read all this. I know it's long but I want to be as helpful as I can :smile:

So far, things I noticed right off the bat: The download actually contains a zip file, in a zip file, IN a zip file. Which makes your download bigger, and I see other people saying it was flagged on itch.io

I downloaded directly from Ludum Dare and the zip file is 2.2 MB, the one on itch.io is only 566k, so it looks to be fixed on itch, just not on LD page, which still contains multiple nested zip files.

As others have said, distributing python games can be hit or miss unless you use something like PyInstaller, especially if the user doesn't have the right requirements or packages already installed on their system. I switched to Linux about six months ago, and it was pretty straightforward since python is already installed by default on most Linux distros, (but I know on Windows it can be a bit more of a pain to get things to play nice)

What I did to get it working: - Unzipped the download - cd into the directory - run 'python3 -m venv venv' to create a virtual environment - run 'source venv/bin/activate' to activate the virtual environment - run 'python3 main.py' and get an error of "ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pygame'" since I don't have pygame installed and it's not a default part of python - run 'pip install pygame' which installs pygame to the virtual environment - run 'python3 main.py' again, and now the game runs.

This is a lot of steps for someone who is non-technical (or not a :nerd: like me), so I highly recommend following the advice of others on how to package your games going forward. That being said, I'm going to take a break in writing this to actually play your game now ^_^

Ok, ESPECIALLY for a first game, and ESPECIALLY for the COMPO instead of taking extra time to work on things for the JAM, I'm pretty impressed! That being said, I have a few things I want to say about overall game design stuff:

As others have pointed out, the small fish being part of the background isn't very clear. I noticed that your shots and (I think) the submarine also go behind the small fish. I am not a pygame dev, but I'm sure it has some type of z-ordering or z-index to determine what gets drawn in front vs. what's drawn in the background. That will help to let players know what to focus on shooting and what they can ignore.

I also noticed that if I was going left on the screen, the sub turns left, but if I shoot it still fires to the right, unless there was some other command I missed to change the direction you were shooting.

The music was a bit annoying, but again if it's something you threw together in a short amount of time, it's probably not going to be perfect. Some sound effects for shooting, killing enemies, and maybe some type of scoring system or goal for the player to work towards would also be really nice.

OVERALL, this was a really solid first entry, and I hope to see you participating in more events!!!

aynu 2025-04-24 11:13

Thanks @rubiksnoob13 it realy helped ans i will try better and i actually made better music but i pressed escape and i had to come up with this since I had some irl work but I will try and adding better graphics and music on the future to itch.io i am working on other stuff like irl things, speed cubing competitions and other stuff but still love game dev and i thank all of you who game me support and courage to continue especially when I thought no one would pay attention to the new commer so I thank all fo you again and I am noting down all of this so I can actually fix them one by one!!!