zichemerr 2025-04-08 11:17
Cool idea!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Escape the Depths
By jhonny111
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 493 | 3.47 | 23 | |
| Fun | 517 | 3.26 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 604 | 3.00 | 23 | |
| Theme | 202 | 4.04 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 604 | 3.28 | 23 | |
| Audio | 1 | |||
| Humor | 1 | |||
| Mood | 360 | 3.69 | 23 |
Cool idea!
Aiming can feel a little unwieldly and it took me a bit to figure out what to do in the beginning, but the game has a neat gameplay loop. It's satisfing to play in the same way Terraria is.
Controls are a bit clancky, but the game is good. Love the atmosphere
You really should have had weapon switching on a different button. Cool little dungeon crawler though.
Really high effort for a jam game, there's a lot to upgrade and do! Here's some feedback: - I think I could've gotten stuck with non-upgraded lantern pretty easily if I didn't get lucky by seeing the area with monsters right before I was about to give up - just hacking through map and not knowing where to go! - the game had a bit of a horror mood to it with the darkness and vignette and sound, so seeing the happy blob monsters was a bit of a contrast to that - maybe it would be even more impactful with some cute creepiness added, something like Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion? Thanks for making it! It was fun!
Minecraft is my life! Minecraft! I ran into a bug where the character moves wherever it wants, and there's no way to fix it. The controls are broken.
This was actually pretty fun! Upgrading your pickaxe makes a huge difference and it's nice find some walls that are too strong for you. I've managed to break 5 walls at the same time, really cool! The first time I've encountered one of those underground worms they gave me such a jump scare.
Good use of the theme! Very atmospheric feeling of exploring the depths. One thing i would have changed regarding the controls is having the direction you use your tool/weapon in be independent from your movement (in the direction you the mouse perhaps). Only being able to use then in cardinal directions feels a bit limiting. Great work and thanks for the game!
Headline: "Madlads make corekeeper in a game jam" I enjoy mining games, so I played until the end. Maybe the aim was to have the core of the game and it's ok. I always love to see some personal touch to the game ideas, which this game was missing. Enemies, huge map, and an upgrade system is super impressive to do within jam times. Very well done :clap:
PS: smol bug, I think if player damages a wall you scale the collider too so it's possible to squeeze between walls which I used plenty :smile:
Screenshot 2025-04-11 161658.png
Great game, I played it whole! Controls are a bit wacky and searching for points of interest can sometimes be too long, so I would suggest making them easier to find or just speeding up the mining animation (the big swing was kinda annoying). Good job, I love it!
I lost on the room with the little mages and worms 😥
I liked the game, I just feel like there's an issue with how progression feels. I felt like resources are very scarce, so you have to explore every point of interest to get the upgrades. Once you get them it feels great breaking walls easily, but just when you are breaking walls with one hit, you go back to having to hit them 3 times until you upgrade again with a new currency. It's more like "restarting" rather than "progression".
Also, there's much empty space. When you don't have any dark spots on the map, you can just keep going and going, without really knowing if there's something there. It can be very frustrating!
The player movement is very fast, yet the pickaxe animation is so slow. I think that it the animations were a little faster it would make the game much more enjoyable.
Anyways, nice entry! 😁
@chuckiee Yeah. I definitely overscoped. The idea was to have more resource types like some sort of wood aswell for the upgrades and the need to find heatsources to smelt the stuff. Thats why the world feels very empty.
@broco There was also a compass planned but i didnt finish it. That way one would have to wander less aimlessly. I was also not completely happy with how "smooth" attacks and player rotation were, but i was a bit tight on time. I need an artist friend xD.
@urosh Sadly it does not show properly, but the later swings deal proportionally more damage then the animation takes. Its 1x for 1st; 2x for second; and 3x for third swing.
I spent a little over an hour playing this game, and so far — it’s my favorite of the jam! The randomly generated map design is amazing — I absolutely love that sense of exploration. The overall progression feels super rewarding, and the monster design is fantastic. There’s a clear difficulty curve that works really well — the gold mine enemies were tough, but in a really fun way.
I also really appreciate how each upgradeable item significantly impacts gameplay. That kind of meaningful choice makes the game feel incredibly well-designed.
Another thing I really loved was the UI feedback on the right side — seeing what action I took and why it didn’t work was so helpful. It made it easy to understand what I could and couldn’t do, which is something many other jam games didn’t communicate as clearly — but your design totally nailed it.
Honestly, this has been the most satisfying gameplay experience I’ve had so far. I’m an artist (both 3D and 2D)，If you ever need an artist for a future game jam, feel free to reach out，I’d love the chance to collaborate with you!
@jimiasoph Thank you so much for your feedback. I am happy you enjoyed my game so much. It was about 45 hours of work and i am glad people like it. If its alright with you i will add you on discord and write you a message a while before the next jam if i can participate and we can talk to introduce ourselves.
Hi! I just played the game again and finally got close to the ending — it's really fun! 🥰 However, I noticed something strange that might be a bug:
I entered a room earlier that originally had three types of monsters, and at the time, I knew I couldn't defeat them, so I ran away. Later, after upgrading all my equipment, I came back to clear that room — but this time, there were only two slimes left. Even after defeating the slimes, the treasure chest stayed locked.
I remember earlier while digging tunnels, I did encounter one of the monsters from that room outside of it (I think it came from there), but now, no matter how many times I circle back, I can't find the missing monster anywhere. So I'm kind of stuck — I can't open the chest because I can't defeat all the original monsters in that room.
Just wanted to let you know in case it's something worth checking. Thanks again for the awesome game!图像2025-4-12 23.00.jpeg
Wow! This game is a ton of fun! Nice work
I can't believe you made me spend more than an hour playing this :smile:.
This was somehow addictively fun, something about gathering resources and upgrading stuff makes me spend way too long playing a game. The combat is simple but fun and not overly difficult (something I should learn myself lol). Awesome game!
ss.PNG
Awesome game for a game jam!
Really nice entry considering you did it solo! I like the weapon and pickaxe combos after upgrades and the simple but clear windup animation of the enemies. I ran into some issues when I escaped from a room filled with enemy deciding to come back after some upgrades. It seemed that some enemys managed to get to me across the rock (the shooting guys).I came back and defeat all the enemies I saw in the room but the chest did't open. And later I tried to energize the gate but found one gate stone lost which seemed to be in the locked chest...Some codes making enemies out of sight go back may help. Great job regardless!