gaverion 2025-04-08 01:53
A bit too hard for me :D
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Race Through the Depths
By cure
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 582 | 3.34 | 54 | |
| Fun | 476 | 3.32 | 54 | |
| Innovation | 804 | 2.51 | 54 | |
| Theme | 779 | 2.77 | 54 | |
| Graphics | 658 | 3.13 | 54 | |
| Mood | 712 | 3.04 | 53 |
A bit too hard for me :D
Nice work on this one, I appreciated the number of mechanics you were able to fit in, and overall the platforming felt pretty solid. I thought that the dynamic camera was well done as well, zooming out in the sections that needed more context.
I think that the heavy vignette effect made it a little difficult for me to see what was coming up in platforming sections, and I often died because I needed to make what amounted to a blind jump.
00:27.79 i assume this is world record? fun game! chrome_2025-04-07_21-58-02.png
@farzher My best time was 27.97, so probably! Very impressive! Thanks for playing :)
Tough but satisfying! Great mechanics, solid platforming
Too complicated for a clumsy player like me =)
Nice mechanics, Having some checkpoints would help the difficulty
Nice! A very complete experience - love how the camera starts close to give you time to learn the controls without overwhelming you, then zooms out to show you the challenges ahead - well done!
@kielant It is a speed running game with a pretty short (~30 second) length, so I'm not sure I think checkpoints would make much sense.
Overall pretty good, though I think some simple sound effects and ambience would have gone a long way to create an atmosphere around the gameplay. The movement mechanics were a bit unclear at first but once I figured it out it was pretty intuitive. Sound effects would help differentiate between a double jump and wall jump, though particle effects could also be used to indicate that.
@team-9tailed Absolutely, I had sound and music, as well as more art and a tutorial and more levels on my todo list, but I was just doing too many things I'd never done before and ran out of time. Just writing the simple shader to add post processing took me like six hours. Wish I could have gotten sound in before the deadline, you are super right.
@cure I totally understand, I had similar issues with my entry. I had much more I wanted to do but couldn't get nearly all of it in and had to cut a lot of planned content to meet the deadline.
Good game. Good luck!
The movement is surprisingly tight for a game jam game. Nice job
Hello! I found you from my game review, like many people, you need to play on itch (I've modified the path) Thank you for playing and your game is cool, even when I always fall down the ladder
I couldn't handle the controls — it was too difficult for me.
Very cool implementation of the wall jumpimg. Plus there is a little hardcore. I wish you could add sounds to the game:) You are great!
@ryusohyeong Thanks! I have definitely learned my lesson about not leaving sounds till last in game jams, this is the second time I have run out of time before being able to add them.
New record by my best friend is 26.58 Seconds! Please leave a comment letting me know if you beat it :)
looks like i'm your new bestfriend / roomate now Race_Through_The_Depths_2025-04-09_20-33-33.png
@farzher wild!
@cure and just to make sure i don't lose the record again:
Race_Through_The_Depths_2025-04-09_20-48-08.png
You, my friend, are a sadist. There was so much restarting and dying and hurting myself on the lava. It was rage inducing and I couldn't stop playing. The controls were smooth, but I would have liked a little more instruction on double jumps and if the different boxes did different things.
@jddoesdev it is immensely gratifying to hear you couldn't stop playing! I ended up spending too much time refining my character controller and didn't have time for everything else (art, tutorial, sound, etc). Good to know doublejump wasn't clear enough.
The blue boxes are low gravity.
Just more proof I suck at video games
Solid platforming! Really addicting and challenging.
I did 35 seconds something I think
I can definitely feel the depth in the movement of the character. Sadly the level design and the visibility makes it really hard, because of that Im not really tempted to speedrun it. However it reminded me of super meat boy because of the difficulty, I'd say it works better as a die and retry in that sense. Great job nonetheless !
Solid entry, plays great! This game caused me great pain but then great joy when I finally got it lol great work, solid entry!
I was determined to get a good run but it wasn't really going well or me lol, I only got silver. Maybe I 'll try it again later.
it's a fun short challenging speed game and I like that
Very solid entry! Very impressive that you managed to get so much playtime out of just a 30 second level. As I get runs in I could feel myself improving at the controls and had fun unlocking new movement tech like jumping to slide up hills faster or releasing a jump sooner so I could land on a conveyor belt sooner. I could see the possibility for improvement on my time so you managed to hook me into grinding until I got a gold medal. I don't know that I'll ever beat that 26.50 but I'm pretty proud of my time. I could definitely see this being developed into having a few more levels with leaderboards of the best times. But I know designing a tight speedrun like this can be hard for a single level let alone multiple! Also last thing is I would love for the bronze/silver/gold times to be displayed somewhere in game to let the player know exactly what they're aiming for rather than just "40 seconds or less". Overall really nice game!
RaceThroughTheDepths.png
Happy you shared it on my stream. Really enjoyed playing something else genre-wise !
I love speedy and difficult platformers, so I was excited to give this a try!
Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to complete the course 😢 The vignette effect made it so that I couldn't see where to turn next, and moving quickly often led to my death as I hit an off-screen lava pit, which was frustrating.
I managed to figure out path up until these moving platforms, but once I got up to the top of them, I couldn't figure out where to go next - There was a wall to the left, and jumping to the right just led to my death.
blind-jump.gif
I haven't left a rating, because I don't want to rate half of the game, and I'm happy to come back and try again later, but I wanted to pass along that feedback in case it's useful!
Let me know what I'm missing 😅
@koolruz the wall to the left doesn't go up all the way, the path continues there. Thanks for playing! The vignette is for sure a bit too big.
@cure Thanks! It took like 25 minutes to get there, but I finally scraped by with a bronze!
bronze-medal.PNG
After finishing the game, I think that I definitely agree with the above feedback that a checkpoint halfway in would have been really useful, even with how short of a game it is - I had *so many* runs make it to this jump and die, that I eventually just stopped at the jump and kept practicing a very slow and consistent wall jump until I knew I could get over it in my next run. It would have been great if I could have kept practicing it at full speed from a checkpoint. It felt incredibly difficult, as a first-timer
deadly-jump.PNG
Otherwise, I think that's all the feedback I really have - Hopefully it's useful! :) And great job!
I like the clean control scheme. I died a lot :laughing: but got the hang of it over time. The wall jump is a cool mechanic as well. Congrats on a good submission!
At first I thought that this was too hard for me, but then I started getting used to the controls and jumps and thing got way more interesting! I'm nowhere near as skilled as others but it was still a fun experience. Great work!
[Thanks for submitting your game to stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2431006955?t=03h51m53s)
I'm a sucker for a speedrunning platformer with tight controls. Nice job on this one!
Had a great time playing on stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2428803190?t=2h13m11s
I really enjoyed getting better at this game as I played. That felt super satisfying. I also think there are some really fun little flows in the level design that just feel so good to nail. Excellent job!
Congratulations on your courage in making a game by yourself. For that alone you deserve my admiration.
Congratulations
Had a good time with this one. It reminds me of the first game jam I made that was also a brutal platformer. One thing that was an initial issue with that game was no checkpoints. I think that the game having checkpoints would alleviate much of the issues with pathfinding. Now since i understand that this is a speedrun game that checkpoints are a difficult thing to add. I probably would have did them for a first run or every run, but if you die and use a checkpoint the time does not count. Some arrows could have also been helpful in a few parts because it really did feel like blind leap of faith a few times. For the last section I actually thought you were meant to pogo on the walls surrounding the end so i did that and then jumped off into the lava to the right. Overall great entry. I did not grind for a crazy time so I ended up with 29.96 which was sub 30 so i took it.
I am not really one for precision jump platformers but I did give this one several tries! Got to the "blind jump" on the third moving platform and just couldn't work out where to go. Died three times and gave up there :) Nice entry though with some good feel and looks.
Funny, but pretty tough! You’ll need some serious nerves to get through this game =) Took me so many tries just to get past the very first obstacles — I can only imagine how hard it gets later on! Wishing you lots of success with your creative work!
I was definitely engaged enough to retry it a lot of times, didn't get to the end but pretty far I think? Going fast is fun, but I'd probably make lava hurtboxes a tiny bit smaller (to make the game feel less punishing). Maybe there could be an unrated mode with checkpoints, to make it easier to learn the more tricky parts. Also, desperately needs audio, some speedrunning music to keep the spirits up ^^
Very nice speedrunner! I'll come back and get the sub 30 eventually :D Screenshot_11.png
Simple but effective, the movement works flawlessly I just wasn't any good at it. I played your game for 41 minutes in total and beat it once. It isn't the most embarrassing performance I've had in a game this jam believe it or not but it's gotta be up there. Scorechasing games seem to have me in a strangle hold this jam despite me being really awful at them in general. Here's a link to both times I played.
https://www.youtube.com/live/SCbuh9WZHdA?si=ktOeS1BXpnjJqBeH&t=3385
https://www.youtube.com/live/IBbnvXqYD3A?si=Q5vdNbo9zSwWzpmP&t=172
Well. AT THE VERY LEAST, I TRIED! I’ll admit, this genre isn’t really my thing — speed and precision are not exactly my strong suits — but I gave it an honest try. At least 30 times!
What I do love about games like this is the feeling of progress — how your own skill grows. At first, I couldn’t even jump onto the first ledge, but by the end, I was clearing it almost with my eyes closed!
The visuals are cool, and the environmental mechanics are really nice — wall-jumping, in particular, was something fresh and new for me.
The one thing I really missed was music. I ended up playing Megalovania in the background, and it made the whole thing way more fun :^D
Overall, it was an interesting experience. As a representative of its genre, I think this game does a great job! Thank you so much for your work!