FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD57 → The Depths, A Floppy Cat Adventure

The Depths, A Floppy Cat Adventure

By katastudios

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall2883.7339
Fun2793.6138
Innovation2373.5938
Theme2833.9338
Graphics3533.8539
Audio4223.2038
Humor684.0136
Mood3093.7738

Comments

2009yasha2009 2025-04-08 02:29

What a gorgeous caaaat!!! I'm in love with him >~<

jnur 2025-04-08 02:42

Don't have access to a Windows PC right now, but just swinging by to say that the graphics remind me of those old free/shareware games in the best possible way!

jordanfb 2025-04-08 02:50

Incredible! My poor laptop was struggling, but the game was super cool. Very fun controls and lots of settings as well.

rack47 2025-04-08 03:12

The controls are very fun! I really like the grabbing mechanic.

hollowheartedcabbage 2025-04-08 05:25

cat is cute

jag 2025-04-08 06:24

I love the aesthetics of the game, they remind me of LittleBigPlanet for some reason with the weighty, physics based movement. I think the game needs a bit of sign posting on how and what to do, because it took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to get into the submarine. Pressing F didn't do anything for me next to the desk so I had to keep bouncing till I got in the submarine. But once I was in, it was very interesting to dive around!

katastudios 2025-04-08 07:00

@2009yasha2009 @hollowheartedcabbage thanks! I'm really proud of him! I'm planning to add more/better fur patterns btw, let me know if you have a favorite cat coloring!

@jnur awesome! definitely an inspiration!

@jordanfb oh cool! I'm glad it ran! I spent some time saturday night optimizing stuff, so I'm glad that paid off! Btw, the "Quality" setting in the "Display" options is one of the biggest impacts on render time, it lowers the internal resolution which approximately doubles fps for me at 1/2 quality setting.

@rack47 hell yeah!

@jag oh!! great point! The shinyness of the water can also make it hard to see the sub sometimes from above. I made a literal sign model but forgot to put it in the game, lol!

sharky3188 2025-04-08 07:09

Controls felt pretty wild to me, i sort of felt like i wasn't really in full control, took a while to get used to. Feels pretty unique, a lot to explore. Didn't get heaps far as my sub kept exploding, which was an unexpected cool part of the game.

infecsean 2025-04-08 07:16

what is this and why is it so fun! Very cute, very wacky controls, graphics, umm, wow.

ayuv 2025-04-08 07:35

Controls are addictive and movements of the cat are fun to watch. I tried lowering the quality settings but I just can't seem to get out of the pause menu every time I change the settings. Escape doesn't work and when i press 'back' the ui becomes huge and I'm stuck. image_2025-04-08_130520830.png

katastudios 2025-04-08 07:41

@ayuv oh yeah I see there's a bug there. Looks like there is a workaround though until I get a patch! There's an unfinished "inventory" feature. If you hit 'I', it'll bring up the inventory view, and then you can hit escape and it will override the settings menu and get rid of all the menus, returning you to normal gameplay and it seems like the rest of the menu works fine after that... btw thank you so much for the bug report!

ayuv 2025-04-08 07:59

@katastudios lovely, imma go have some fun moving this goofy cat around LOL

izzqz 2025-04-08 14:36

WOW! Wacky and fun FIVE STARS!

ugly-robot 2025-04-08 20:29

What an amazing entry! I can't imagine trying to come up with such a complex character controller and animation system (and vehicle controller!!) in such a short time! There are so many details that are downright shocking to see in a jam game: * The beautiful (and useful) window-pattern on the sub's lights * Procedural turbine animations! * A character creator!? Oh my god! * the one/two handed grab system is hilarious and so fun! * diving deep deep deep and getting absolutely clobbered by a school of mega-fish was amazing

My absolute favorite moment was heading back with my first winnings and thinking "You know, this thing's pretty fast - I wonder if it will let me breach the water like a dolphin! I bet I could get 5-10ft of air!" I then rocketed to the surface and proceeded to get over a hundred feet of stomach-dropping air, flying over the entire island, and laughing the whole time as I tumbled back to earth. Yall should be very proud!

katastudios 2025-04-08 21:19

Ok! Got some sleep and a morning coffee, and got 2 patches out! Fixed the menu issue that @ayuv reported and an second related bug that broke the intro/loading screens, a bug where sea creatures would desire to explore the sky but get stuck next to the sea surface since they cannot in fact fly, and then I re-enabled the profile selection button on the main menu since it was accidentally disabled when disabling unfinished stuff.

@ugly-robot @izzqz @infecsean @sharky3188 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Awesome!! I'm so happy you all are having so much fun with the game! Thank you so much for the reviews!

pretendcoding 2025-04-08 23:14

I'm not going to rate it because it's probably an issue on my end, but I get about 8 steps in before the game crashes. Tried to play it about 4 times, so idk. Looks cool though.

riggen 2025-04-08 23:25

My submarine pulled a Titan. I have no idea why. Cute game.

katastudios 2025-04-08 23:44

@pretendcoding Aw lame, I'm sorry it's not running for you. If you don't mind, what cpu/gpu do you have, and did you play the patched version or the unpatched? Also, depending on the reason for the crash, the game will try to log the error to "error.txt". If the error file was generated, please let me know what it says, that might help solve the problem too!

@riggen XD were you going at full speed or turning super sharply? If not it may have been the cat tail colliding with the sub, had a really hard time getting that to work at all lol.

pretendcoding 2025-04-08 23:55

@katastudios I played the patched version. I have Ryzen 7 3700x and RX 5700 XT. I'm not finding an error log, though I suppose it didn't crash, it just infinitely hung. I just tried it again and let it sit, after a few minutes I gave up. It crashes after about 5 seconds of in-game play.

jordanfb 2025-04-08 23:56

tried patch 1.0.2 and it failed to open, it created a txt file next to the .exe saying "failed to open file!" unfortunately that's not a very helpful error but it's what I got for you. I was able to play earlier though I just wanted to give it a shot again.

EDit: Yeah I guess I didn't understand the patch was just a patch, not all the game files. I was definitely expecting to just be able to unzip one thing and play, but glad it's an easy fix.

katastudios 2025-04-09 00:04

@pretendcoding ah ok, so in that case I'm guessing one of my shaders isn't playing nice with your gfx card. Gonna have to find someone to loan me an amd card lol

@jordanfb hahaha what a bad error message, luckily ctrl+f only found one instance in my codebase, so that means the game didn't find the shader files, did you happen to run the patch exe without the Resources folder? If the folder just has the exe, you gotta copy-paste that exe into your original folder to upgrade it to the patched version. I'll make the instructions more clear!

dominic-graziano 2025-04-09 03:12

the animations and overall art vibe was fun, gameplay was decent if a bit wonky at times. nice job!

sam-gorman 2025-04-09 05:01

This game seems really interesting and ambitious for a solo project - there's even a character creator! Unfortunately, even on the lowest settings I can't get it to run at more than ~5 fps on my laptop, which is pretty headache-inducing. So I didn't get to try the actual submarine gameplay. I'd love to play this in the future if I can get it to work on my machine.

floppynub 2025-04-09 05:41

Highly impressive for a solo jam, especially given it's in a custom engine. I imagine you're learning all sorts of fun ways that different computers might not like your engine :P Any game with a cat gets bonus points from me. The controls were a little janky, but that also added some enjoyable humor so not the end of the world.

bongard22 2025-04-09 06:04

Had a blast playing here on this timestamped vod: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2427848024?t=1h12m33s

katastudios 2025-04-09 15:26

@dominic-graziano thanks so much!

@sam-gorman yeah, I'm definitely working on a low graphics setting! There is a lot to optimize lol!

@floppynub for real, although it's gone a lot better than I expected! I had a nightmare that the only comments were going to be crash reports!

@bongard22 oh aweosome!! Thanks for voding it too! You guys had some really great feedback!

sam-gorman 2025-04-09 15:27

@katastudios To be fair, I think a lot of it is just Unreal Engine 5, not your game in particular. It isn't a well-optimized engine and it doesn't really work on anything but high-end PCs.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give a low rating for a game I haven't played, lol.

katastudios 2025-04-09 23:31

@sam-gorman I'm stoked you thought it was unreal! This is actually made in my homemade engine! Also no worries about ratings, this is my first game jam and I'm just happy to have finished the game in time!

sam-gorman 2025-04-10 00:01

@katastudios That’s incredible! I could’ve sworn it said UE5 in the files, I must’ve been thinking of another game. I’ve played a few unreal games this jam that ran far worse than yours, for the record.

dandee 2025-04-10 06:35

The controls were hard BUT the derpy animations made it make sense xD Insane level of detail and customisation in this game! Well done!

dreo 2025-04-11 08:43

Not sure why, but everything I do in this game feels kinda cool. The cat animation is awesome!!! Loved the audio too.

The gameplay was pretty tough for me — my cargo kept flying off the vehicle while driving. But still, really fun idea!

sam-gorman 2025-04-11 19:56

Alright, I messed with some settings and got the game to run!

I really like the gameplay loop, diving down then bringing treasure back to land. It gives the player lots of little victories and provides a safe space to re-assess and practice the controls. I also liked how the game forced you to leave your sub and swim by yourself to get treasure, which upped the tension a lot. The graphics are also adorable - great contrast between the silly cat and the odd world you explore.

I do like silly physics controls, but to me these ones erred on the side of frustrating. Both the cat and the sub took a long time to react to any direction I pressed and were wobbling all over the place - including the camera, which kept ending up off-axis and being pretty disorienting. I also think there could be a higher concentration of stuff to do underwater - you move really slowly, and there's large stretches of empty ground with no treasure.

Overall, very impressive work, especially for a solo dev. This is a rare game I see potential in as a larger project in the future!

farzher 2025-04-11 20:05

this game is epic. the physics are very fun. nice game engine!

texugo 2025-04-12 23:36

I'm devastated that you made the fish too big to fit inside my submarine. Nice game! The camera made me a little nauseated but it was still fun to play. I love the silly cat with the silyl animations!

fupi 2025-04-13 01:58

I'm actually so sad :sob: I wanted so bad to see what this cute floppy cat game was about bc i love his face so much but it doesn't run on my computer... the error log says "failed to create audio", I tried both the patched and unpatched versions

katastudios 2025-04-13 02:49

@fupi hmmm failed to create audio? That is very unusual. I've only seen that on a computer with broken sound drivers. Do you have a streamer setup or other unusual sound system? Either way I can make that error not quit the game at least. Thank you so much for reporting the issue!

fupi 2025-04-13 02:56

@katastudios No streamer setup. Let me see, my laptop uses Realtek drivers, I have FL Studio ASIO but I don't know if that's running all the time, and also I use USB-C headphones instead of the audio jack, but the game still crashes when I unplug them and just use my speakers.

wetburritosupreme 2025-04-14 04:09

I'm flabergasted, this is such a gem!

katastudios 2025-04-14 05:19

@fupi hmm ok, thank you so much for the details! I made a new build with more detail in the error log for audio, also it now just disables audio rather than exit the game if there's an audio issue. If you have time I'd love to see if that version works for you and what gets printed into the error file from this new version.

@wetburritosupreme @farzher @dreo @dandee <3 thank you so much!

@sam-gorman @texugo the new post jam update makes the camera a lot better, and that's some great feedback! The plan from here is the refine the controls and add more content to explore and then sub customization :P

fupi 2025-04-14 12:09

@katastudios I downloaded the post-jam version now and it did run, but then it crashed during loading...

``` 04/14/25 09:04:29: failed to create audio from audio/cricketloop.mp3

04/14/25 09:04:37: models/Foliage/bush.glb Failed to parse glTF ```

katastudios 2025-04-14 16:38

@fupi Ah interesting! That seems like it isn't finding the resources folder at all, did you perhaps not unzip the folder or move just the exe out? Thank you so much for troubleshooting this btw! <3

fupi 2025-04-14 17:20

Nope, I extracted everything :< here's what I have

Captura de tela 2025-04-14 141745.png

Also no problem!! I just really wanna play it hdfjh it's my duty since you played my game too

fupi 2025-04-14 17:25

Right as I took the screenshot I figured something out. I put the game's folder directly in my C drive and it managed to load, sound included! Maybe it's not playing nice with my computer's language, since the folder's name is translated? (Desktop => Área de Trabalho)

Unfortunately as soon as it loaded, I got another error message: `failed to submit draw command buffer! id: -4 resultState: 1`

katastudios 2025-04-14 17:37

@fupi oh!! That probably has something to do with the problem! I bet I'm not handling unicode strings properly in some way! Thank you so much! As for the new error :< that usually means that your gpu didn't have enough ram to load the game - maybe though it's just the unicode bug again

fupi 2025-04-14 18:38

Well I'm running a laptop with just an integrated Intel graphics card, so that might as well be it :sweat_smile: Hope I helped you anyway!

sarah 2025-04-24 21:03

I found the controls to be a bit too sensitive and wonky, but the cat was cute! And I liked the customization, nice job!

gustavo-christino 2025-04-26 07:22

:flag_br:

hardtoplay.png

O jogo demandou bastante do processamento do meu computador. Fiquei meio assustado. Hahahahahahah. Mas tudo bem.

Quero adiantar que eu tenho aquela parada de ficar meio "tonto" quando o jogo Ă© 3D, entĂŁo nĂŁo Ă© o estilo de jogo mais compatĂ­vel comigo (por conta de como a cĂąmera se comporta).

No geral o jogo mostra grande potencial por parte do criador, pois cada elemento ali foi bem feito ao analisar Ă  parte. Um menu bacana com opçÔes que permitem se conectar um pouco ao personagem. Um ponto de partida que ancora a experiĂȘncia. Geração do terreno acontecendo bem na frente dos meus olhos. Um personagem que anda de forma estranha, mas que parece dar ideias de cartunesco.

Eu não me diverti tanto, dado que não consegui me dar bem com o controle do submarino e ir andando/nadando até as caixas para agarrar elas tenha sido algo difícil e demorado.

Pude notar algum potencial de inovação ao apreciar o acabamento do jogo, ainda mais pensando no quĂŁo breve foi o tempo para alcançar tamanho nĂ­vel de experiĂȘncias interconectadas de mecĂąnicas e funcionamentos do jogo.

O uso do tema foi OK.

Os grĂĄficos estĂŁo bonitos para o gĂȘnero escolhido (meu pobre submarino ficou em pedaços).

O som do jogo, ao menos no que notei, estå nos efeitos sonoros. Então não tem muito o que avaliar em termos de imersão e narrativa (neste caso), mas dentro do que os efeitos sonoros possibilitaram, o som ajudou no feedback de algumas açÔes (no menu e em outros momentos).

NĂŁo creio que a ĂȘnfase seja no humor, mas o gato ser desengonçado me fez rir um pouco.

A ambientação, para mim, acaba ficando reduzida por conta do meu problema com 3D. Tentando ignorar isso, senti falta de me conectar com uma narrativa para além de fazer o trabalho de pegar as caixas (um motivo ou uma sensação de propósito). Vou tentar jogar um pouco mais.

Creio que o projeto possa ser publicado para aprendizado da equipe de desenvolvimento e coletar mais feedbacks, sinto que eu nĂŁo sou bem o pĂșblico-alvo, mas espero ter colaborado.

gustavo-christino 2025-04-26 07:31

:flag_us:

gato.png

The game demanded a lot from my computer’s processing power. I got a little scared. Hahahahahahah. But it’s all good.

I should mention upfront that I tend to get a bit "dizzy" when playing 3D games, so it’s not the type of game that suits me best (mainly because of how the camera moves).

Overall, the game shows great potential from the creator, because each individual element was well made when analyzed separately. A nice menu with options that allow a bit of connection to the character. A starting point that anchors the experience. Terrain generation happening right in front of my eyes. A character that walks a bit awkwardly, but it gives off a cartoony vibe.

I didn’t have that much fun, since I struggled a lot with controlling the submarine, and walking/swimming to the boxes to grab them was difficult and slow for me.

Still, I could notice some potential for innovation when appreciating the game’s polish — especially considering how little time there was to achieve such a level of interconnected mechanics and systems.

The use of the theme was OK.

The graphics look nice for the chosen style (my poor submarine ended up in pieces).

The game’s sound, at least from what I noticed, is mostly in the sound effects. So there isn’t much to evaluate in terms of immersion or narrative (in this case), but within what the sound effects could offer, they helped with action feedback (in the menu and in other moments).

I don't think the focus was humor, but the clumsy cat made me laugh a little.

For me, the atmosphere ends up feeling a bit reduced because of my personal difficulty with 3D. Trying to set that aside, I did miss having some sort of connection to a narrative beyond just picking up the boxes (like a reason or a sense of purpose). I’ll try to play a bit more.

I believe the project could be published for the development team’s learning and to gather more feedback — I feel like I’m not exactly the target audience, but I hope I contributed!