Search The Depths

magnesiumninja 2025-04-08 01:25

I really liked the flow of launching the submarine from the ship, flying through the air, and crashing down through the water. Dropping below the waves had a great feeling to it.

I felt that the optimal strategy for picking up items was just to repeatedly hold left, then right, zig-zagging rapidly through the water. I wonder if there's something that could be done to prevent that flow (either giving the player more sight below to react to oncoming items, or making the turn have acceleration to it)

Nice work!

cohav0310 2025-04-08 02:07

This was more addictive then I thought. You have an amazing gameplay loop here. Reminds me of Learn to Fly.

sayeg 2025-04-08 17:29

Cool! Love the concept and the development!

frankiechatot 2025-04-09 15:18

Very fun game! I liked the addition of upgrades, even if I had a little difficulty in understanding whether i got them or not.

floppynub 2025-04-09 17:24

Nice entry, I enjoyed the loop and the graphics were top notch. Fun water shader. Once I got used to how fast I move, I was able to progress fairly well, but it was a bit jarring at first. If you're looking for an improvement to make, I'd say slow down the rate of falling so you can slow down the movement speed as well. Then you could add upgraded movement speed to the upgrades shop! And perhaps you fall faster and faster as you collect items?

Idk, that's one of many possible solutions but the general idea is just to introduce some progression into how quickly your sub can move. Regardless, I ended up really enjoying the speedy movements, so I think it's in a great place either way :D

gamescodedogs 2025-04-11 06:56

It would be great to make a web build.

idos 2025-04-11 18:09

I like how water look in this game, In my game it look different.

the-stewarts 2025-04-13 12:29

I like the launching of the submarine! It works well for a simple concept, would be interested to see what ideas you have for expanding it further

blushingcrow 2025-04-15 10:58

Great aesthetic and loved the little touches - loop absolutely doesn't need tweaks, it's a joy to play. Love the graphics too - well done

ty-victorson 2025-04-20 09:55

Game looked great and was a blast to play, only things id tweak is the side to side movement could be slowed down a bit, nice job!

saryah 2025-04-24 01:28

This was really fun! neat and tidy game with a fun loop. I think I'd also vote for slightly slower left/right movement. Also the game crashed for me on Windows 11 the first few times I tried, with a error something like "unable to assign video memory" until I ran as admin (not sure if co-incidence, I couldn't to get the error again after I ran it successfully the first time).

imnotvegan 2025-04-24 12:45

This idea has a lot of potential

It would be nice if the game explained the difference between the different submarine release powers better

Also, there was a lack of explanation of where to move underwater and where I am at the moment, sometimes collectibles stopped appearing

Adding obstacles to the submarine's operation underwater and upgrades that affect the bypass of these obstacles and the behavior of the submarine would greatly improve the game, a good idea would be to implement the use of constantly accumulating fish and cargo for these upgrades

It would not hurt to add victory conditions to the game, at some point the game turns into an endless descent down

jelch 2025-04-24 23:23

Nice job!

alphish 2025-04-25 06:06

The game has some foundation of a launcher upgrade game, but misses some key aspects that make this kind of game fun. Two things that stand out to me. First, the launch sequence doesn't affect how well I will perform in the given run (because I will get similar collectibles no matter where I begin the descent). Second, there is little mid-term benefit to diving deeper aside from bragging rights, because I don't get any upgrade money for getting further, and after a while collectibles disappear; that's in contrast with usual launcher games where items get denser or more valuable the further you reach.

Also, it would be nice to get a greater variety of upgrades, though to warrant these tweaking the game elements might need to be done first; at the moment, aside from collectibles magnets and maybe improved horizontal and descent speed I can't think of something that would improve the loop as-is. Though getting these upgrades would be nice too. Also, I'd prefer if there was some shared currency, or maybe varied prices for varied upgrades; currently, fuel is the rarest collectible by far, and getting 5 units of fuel was consistently the blocker here. Though I acknowledge time constraints might have gotten in a way.

I might have eventually reached the bottom? Or at least, around what seemed like 10k kilometers, I got to a brighter background without any text and my "return to ship" button got disabled? Does it mean I win? I did try leaving the submarine on freefall to see what happens when I reach Mariana Trench depth, so I guess that's what happens?

There is nice little base here but the entry could use some design bits from launcher games. ^^'