Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

From The AbyssView game page

Something bad is happening in the ship...
Submitted by WeissErde, andresao11 — 6 hours, 25 minutes before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

From The Abyss's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall fun and playability#651.6802.000

Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme incorporation
We Incorporated The Sinking Ship theme:
The player runs on a timer to escape the current floor of the spaceship the player is in.
The Chicken restriction can be seen as a LineArt on the Keycard PickUps.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted

The art is good, the spaceship part of the game looks good. But the movement felt really bad, it felt like it was not working sometimes. The game needs more feedback for combat and effects.

Unreal is bad for performance by default , some of the default settings needing turning off such as TAA has huge impact on performance even in blank scenes. I did make same mistake with my own one with that. I notice you had a few debug things showing up such as trace and print screen, I recommend trying not to have them in game so it will look better.

Nice art but the  game needs a lot of work . Still a good try at least.

Submitted

There's some good bones here. I liked the art, the spaceship was cool and the grid movement worked fine if a little bit sticky, not sure if this was a bug I encountered or not.

It would benefit greatly from some more feedback for the player. An animation when attacked, some sound fx for everything (doors, attacking, getting hit). I don't think I ever took any damage. The music was maybe a little too tranquil for a 5 minute escape scenario, maybe something a little more tense!

Not bad, you made a game with a solid foundation and could build upon it to make something great. My gameplay is here

Submitted

I'm going to echo the other comments and say while the visuals can be quite nice, the movement really needs some fine tuning. At some points turning becomes impossible, and the only fix I've found for it is moving my player into an obstacle, and THEN I can turn.

Combat has little to no feedback, so that could be improved as well. Unless I'm mistaken I don't believe it's even possible to be hurt at the moment.

Also the built-in post-processing for Unreal really seemed to make the game chug for me. That's been a constant with all Unreal engine entries this jam, and my computer isn't exactly cheap or old. And the light adjustment is weird, in some areas it makes the game annoyingly dark.

If you can fix the movement, I think you'll have a much more enjoyable game here. And a much better base for future games.

Good work!

Submitted

The look is quite nice. the music is tranquil, and I like the motion blur effects.

The actual scavenger hunt is good, but the movement is pretty unresponsive.  Lots of times I even got snagged on walls or something and couldn't turn.

Honestly watching this back, the amount of time I spent checking the bunk rooms and trying to turn, I'm surprised I actually beat the game on time.

Submitted

The aesthetic was really nice, but the movement was a little unresponsive. Still very enjoyable.

Interesting environment! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games from the Dungeon Crawler Jam.

Submitted

I managed to complete the game with ~30-40 seconds to spare. Good game base but, as it was stated by others, your biggest enemy in the game is the movement, heh. If that was made snappier, the game would instantly become way more fun and the timer could even be reduced.

Submitted

I barely managed to finish the game with about 30 seconds left.

Movement is quite unresponsive half of the time, turning especially simply seems to stop working at all for a while. One one hand that's a big deal when it comes to enjoying the game but on another hand everything else works. The perspective is good, the game looks nice and this small dungeon is good enough with the key cards determining the order of the sequences which feels better than a long corridor and allows for a tight place with logical layouts.

Thanks for sharing.

Submitted

Fantastic job on your first jam game!

As I stated during the stream, I thought the controls could be improved.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

If you would like to rewatch my playthrough, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/hHr9D2aedfs?si=J5gMtPHts3mr6haU&t=2853

Developer

Thank you for your feedback! As this was our first Jam game made in UE5 we stumbled a lot. I'm also mainly a programmer but took a step back to learn art and design for this project.  I'll rewatch your playthrough a lot to debug. I appreciate it. 

Submitted

I liked the general atmosphere of the game, the nice ambient track and the graphics. I got some 2001: A space odyssey vibes from it (which is a good thing).

Along what has been said earlier (debug build), rather slow movement, I ran into an issue where I could not turn at all. Keys A or D did not respond to input, perhaps this is linked to bumping into stuff but I am not 100% sure about this.

Not being able to turn is a bit problematic as I have to face a door to open it so I lost time due to this. I think I had to bump into something in order to unstuck it....

One final technical note: UE5 defaults to the highest graphical settings which includes LUMEN, TAA and so one. This is fine if you got a nice graphics card but I use a midclass notebook to check entries and with an Iris XE iGPU I get about 15/18 FPS so its not a great experience. I do see this quite often with UE jam entries so it was kind of expected, just wanted to notify you that this is worth taking a look at.


Good job and thanks for sharing! 

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! I'll take a look at the strafing and rotating code it's quite an interesting bug. I'll also check out the graphic settings on export. 

Submitted (1 edit)

Interesting game with good music which makes for a great atmosphere.

Movement could be made a bit more fluent and the world could fit a bit better for the grid system. Over all this is a great start to build upon. One game that this makes me recall is the "Robots And Zombies" by Rebello from 3 years ago. LINK to Jam Entry
Maybe have a look at it for more inspirations.

With a few adjustments it would become a great game!

When you run out of time you can still move around and the QUIT and Rstart buttons do not work.

Keep at it!

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for the feedback! I'm already working on the movement to make it feel better and also redesigning the level, for which I am using a good old grid paper sheet to have a better idea of layout overall.  

Submitted

I know that it's an overwhelming task to make a game in UE for the first time. It seems to be easy follow tutorials but once you make any custom mechanics it can become nightmare. I like an art style, as I understand you make it in Blender and this is really nice, cos' it has authentic style. To the cons. You need to take a closer look at UE input system. If you are using UE5 there is a new input system which can help you to choose how to use keyboard keys. For now in many cases I need to press keys twice to make a move (it's probably DoOnce operator isn't reseting). Second thing which is probably most problematic for a lot of games here. Player positioning in a world and camera settings. the problem is to design a world suited for grid movement. if you take a look at Grimrock 2 camera take a part of the floor so it could be something on a floor which can be found and everything is actually made of blocks even if it's exterior level. It helps to build a world where there is no objects which block player movement or overlap with a player. I need to tell one more time that I really like art style and appreciate you put an effort to make it look great. One more thing you need to make a shipping package for final release, you have debug raycasting on, it will stop it. ) 

Developer(+1)

I'm glad you liked the art style. Even after exporting, I spent a lot of time worrying over the metal and roughness values. It turned out quite nicely in the end. I coded the movement so I think I know where the problem is. The spaceship I conceptualized first was more suited to a FP or TP game now that I look at it again, and it shows on the prop placement. I will check Grimrock 2 out. I haven't played many Dungeon Crawlers but I wanted to try making one. The post jam version will probably look a bit different with the prop placement and level redesign but i'm looking forward to it. I will make a shipping package before updating from now on. I didn't know it was something you could do so we lost a lot of time searching for debug prints. I was wondering if I was seeing things but now that I check the blueprint, I realized the ray was set to show for one frame, glad I know how to deal with it now. Thanks for your honest thoughts about the game, I will improve and I hope to see you again in a post jam update!