I'm going to get to the bottom of this. by MrTroy 2025-04-21T18:05:37Z
I like the concept of sending heroes in to the maze one by one without resetting the progress. After I learned to dodge, not fight, I was able to clear it.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Static_Leap_Studios
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Raid the Abyss | extra | ||
| 2025 | 57 | Depths | Disregard this Entry | unfinished |
I like the concept of sending heroes in to the maze one by one without resetting the progress. After I learned to dodge, not fight, I was able to clear it.
I couldn't beat the shopkeeper when I first met him, I liked the game! I would prefer a different combat system to pushing the direction of the enemy rapidly. Overall, it was very well done and nicely polished! The puzzles were intuitive, the sound/music fit really well, and the art was charming!
I was enjoying it! I noticed I never had to worry about resources, I might balance that a bit more. Also, I never got the aerofish hover time upgrade, which helped me win faster I think. Nice art and creative setting, good job!
Very nice job! I recommend a save/load system because I got stuck on a bag of garbage about 15 minutes in, after turning the valve to shut off the steam leak, which sadly discouraged me from retrying to see the ending. Great job on the eerie audio and visual setting, I still have the footsteps in my ears!
Very high quality game, amazing for the timeframe- from fun to art to sound to humor, top notch! Reminds me of hammerfight with the spinning anchor attack, it would be cool to have the impacts feel a bit more weighty.
Nice puzzle/walking simulator! I thought the transitions between rooms that don't make physical sense were well done and the dream-like feel was spot-on! Music and SFX fit well. I did find myself trying to bunny-hop or some other way to go faster but I understand that dream-feeling where you can't go as fast as you want to.
I liked the puzzle, not too hard, not too obvious!
Heads up, try to play on the webpage and this pops up: firefox_gg9GAABGdC.png Maybe try reuploading?
It is an addicting and soothing game, love the sound and music you chose! It was a bit slower paced than I expected in the early game. Getting 30 shells for a house takes a while. Charming art, cute aesthetic, great mood! Love that the snails collect their own shells after a while so you can relax without clicking like crazy, and the UI design fits the theme really well.
I like the mood and the theme fit very well! Good use of audio assets.
Cute and innovative! I figured out how to get past stage one and stack modifiers by sharing the link with myself, but couldn't move the chick to the next stage.
I loved the effect of seeing the deeper layers! I really wanted to do something like that for mine but it didn't work out. Art and sound fit well. The boss was very difficult. I got used to the movement but kept trying to strafe. I wished for a way to increase damage output, to cut down on kiting spiders while my mp recharged. Additional enemies or spells would add more replay value. Great job!
The music being sync'd with the game was very impressive, this had a great level of polish and simple mechanics that allow for skill and strategy! I was around 60k on my first successful run.
I liked the challenge, like bomb defusal meets endless runner! Two bugs that came up for me: moving the sliders didn't work, and warping at the end breaks it. And not sure if it's my browser, but with the scroll bar on the right, it's possible to scroll the screen down away from the controls
Controls felt tight and responsive, audio was clean and high quality! I appreciated that you could reset the timer and not suffer permanent damage when backing out of the high pressure zone. Great job, I would definitely play a few more levels!
Beautiful game! It made me think of pets that have move on and want to cherish the ones still here. The sound effect to the next stage can be turned down a bit I think.
Funny premise, good start, I like the character sprite changing as you change directions! I would like it if the UI were more responsive and if you could open the treasure from any side.
Very fun, I enjoyed playing! I wasn't sure when I did the surround mechanic correctly, and ended up clearing all the ants in range and not being able to find the queen due to the tongue sucking back in.
This was charming, funny, and addictive! I was hoping that I could get through the last layer with strong enough tools, but only broke one or two blocks. Going left was harder than going right because it sent him feet first.
This was really fun! I pushed the button to keep playing after the first tree was defeated, eventually all the buttons disappeared, I might have had too many wamps.
Great fit with the theme! It was a bit difficult to navigate the settings to find English, I was clicking everything seeing what would happen.
This was fun! The controls were difficult to keep straight for me, and it was a bit hard to scare off or torpedo fish that were right on top of me. The music seemed to gain intensity at lower O2 levels, and I thought the name/theme was pretty funny.
Graphics and Audio were top notch, I couldn't figure out how to control the game with mouse and keyboard though. I'm sure that and some other QOL features like a 'Quit' button would make it in if you had longer. The humor style reminded me of rick n morty, nice job!
It was fun! I was defeated at the stage where my pieces were scattered along the map edge and the enemy army was all together. I liked the units getting stronger and leveling up, but it took so much gold to keep them healthy, I think the better strategy might be to let them die and hire new ones? The direction I recommend taking it is to having a more persistent base or something so losing a battle doesn't end the run, but you can rebuild your army after setbacks.
Nicely polished game! Good fusion of a minimalist puzzle game with reflex intensive block-breaker mechanics. It took many tries for me to time my moves right, but I can tell this is something you can develop skill at. It might dilute the pure skill gameplay, but I found myself wishing for adrenaline to widen the path a bit when I could tell I was a few pixels off in my timing.
This was very addicting! I reached the end with about 50 extra beehives, haha! Every once in a while my controls would get stuck, but jamming all the direction keys seemed to fix it. The next building I was wishing I could buy was something to deposit crystals from the behives to reduce running to each one.
Heads up, I went to download on itch.io and got this: firefox_wzcCgxDZYU.png Might be worth contacting someone about removing the scam warning.
Cool idea with the music adapting to the level! I think it could be worth developing more with trickier puzzles using these mechanics
It was fun, the boss surprised me! The hitbox on the mines suprised me too my first dive, but then I gave them a wide berth. firefox_bRvLJV6LID.png
I published this last Thursday, but it still doesn't show up anywhere
Thank you for finding your way to the page! Yes, I was going max effort for a week and a half to try to get it in early enough to get feedback, so it's disappointing that it's being excluded from the entries.
@sicosiber RESOLVED:
If anyone else has this issue, reach out to Mike Kasprzak on bluesky. I didn't want to go to his personal account, but that worked after a week of no fix (and most of the time no reply) from:
LDjam website posts
LD discord, reddit, twitter and bluesky accounts
emails: mikekasprzak@gmail.com, support@ldjam.com
and trying to create a new account to reupload.
So I hope that helps someone avoid frustration in the future.
@pauldee427 Thank you for the kind words! Yes, I wonder if making the enemies level up and your own level reset on death was a mistake. When I was developing it, the only way to come back at that point was luring an orc to the edge of the cliff and kicking him in, which instantly gave like 5 level ups. Thank you for the feedback on the UI not resetting the level on death. Crypt of the Necrodancer looks interesting!
@geometer Thank you! Do you recall what layer/wave you were at when the enemies stopped spawning? Was it the html5 build or the downloadable .exe?
@irwatts Thank you! If I develop this more, I'll definitely need to smooth out the movements, at least from the player's perspective. They're locked to the center of 128x128px tiles, so that's a bit choppy. Maybe a "hold shift to run" or something would help if you miss an enemy a far way off, or just make bigger waves spawn independent of how many enemies are alive so the player is more hemmed in?
@almost I agree, I went with a free medieval looking font but at smaller screen sizes it's hard to read. The itch.io site and the .exe Windows build let you go fullscreen, but I'll see about getting a separate button in for the LD embedded version. Thank you for the feedback!
@rubixnoob13 Thank you for the nice feedback! My brother-in-law did the same friendly fire thing lol - I made their outlines blue and the orcs outlines red, but I should probably take out friendly fire for the good guys altogether. I was thinking that I want the player to never get stuck if surrounded by allies, but maybe a pass-through mechanic could solve that.
@transkuja I'm glad you made it to the boss, it can be punishing! Going toe-to-toe with him is not recommended, to guarantee a win you can let him go for your allies and get behind him or stay on a diagonal tile from him and hit him while he is moving to an adjacent tile.
@pegasys Thank you for the feedback! The idea is that you can raise your shield as they attack, and if you see the enemy axe icon - that is where their attack will come from, so if you put the shield icon up on the same side of your character it should block all damage (although I haven't reliably recreated this bug, I've had other actions like turning, moving, or prepping an attack negate the shield even though the icon is showing). I overlooked the boss scaling out of control after killing the player. I should really just make him level up from going deeper into the abyss and not gain xp from kills.
@0x-void-x0 Thank you for the feedback! I modeled and animated the characters in blender, then rendered them and edited them in Gimp to appear as much like hand drawn sprites as I could. I initially thought I'd do a gun-game style upgrade system from peasant through knight, but the limited characters I had took a long time to get right so I went with level ups increasing a gold glowing effect.
@alvaron It was very good feedback to watch you play it live, thank you for doing that!
@dhim You got us over 20 ratings, thank you! Appreciate the github tips. Do you remember how far you were when it started feeling repetitive? I had the boss arrive at wave 7 of each layer but probably could accelerate that.
@angry-fridge Thank you for the praise, when smthngclvr busted out that music I knew I had to work hard! Yes I will def change the font with the next iteration, this one was the first free medieval style font I came across. I was thinking of putting touchscreen controls so a buddy of mine with no computer can play. Yes, the characters are originally 3d, modeled and animated in blender, then rendered in 2d and edited in Gimp to try to mimic retro sprites. Feel free to follow the github or itch.io if you want a heads up on updates
@aizomon @okuar @gdman Thank you for all the great feedback! The camera/movement should be smoothed out, there are touchscreen controls now if that is more intuitive, and the friendly fire exploit/boss doom-spiral bugs are fixed. Also, the unreadable font was reverted to standard letters. Love the suggestions, and your positive feedback motivated me to start on some of them!
I don't see your game, did you publish it without including a link to it?