Short, but incredibly polished. Right away, the intro cutscene gives the game a lot of character. The amount of detail in the actual game is very impressive, and everything fits together very well atmospherically. The gameplay is fun too, I enjoyed going incredibly fast while trying to keep the cart under control. It doesn't have a lot of variety though, but it's fine for the game length. I imagine the scope was intentionally limited to be able to polish the game to such a high standard. The game doesn't seem to have an ending, so I was looking around for a while to see if I was missing someone. Eventually, I was left with nothing else to do than speed off to infinity (literally, that's what the error message said lol). But that's all the criticism I have, I genuinely can't think of anything else to improve. Fantastic work.
Eschen
Creator of
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Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it. That shop hint is a great suggestion. I forgot to think about the fact that the player doesn't know the upgrade prices in their head. The background actually does change color. It's a script that changes the entire background color depending on player depth. Maybe it needs to be more noticeable?
Hmm, very confusing. The mechanics aren't really explained. It says that I need to be careful to not run out of fuel, but doesn't explain how I would do that. Sometimes my fuel bar went back to full instead of me dying, but I don't know why. And the in-game text about the controls is wrong. If you ended up not having the time to explain these things in-game, maybe you could've explained them in the description. So my main feedback is: Try to look at the game from the perspective of a player who doesn't know how the game works.
Okay, so I played it again, and this time I realized you just need to have some material left when the fuel runs out. Looking back, it seems obvious, but I think the text about refueling the drill made me think I needed to be at the drill to refuel myself. So that made me not pay attention to the other stuff.
Looking at the other aspects, I think this is a good game. The core gameplay idea is pretty strong I think. The visuals are nice, and the digging feels good as well. I especially liked putting a bunch of fuel in the drill, then going off to explore and meeting the drill further down later, in order to not have to build back up. Once I understood how the game works, it was pretty fun.
Glad you liked it! The darkening effect was totally a last-minute addition, good to know it was worth it :D I'm also really happy you liked the difficulty, I was worried it might be too hard.
The gems don't respawn, but the money you have is left where you died. But yeah, the way the death mechanic works right now you can kind of get soft-locked if you're unlucky. I didn't manage to come up with a better solution, since I didn't want to have the player lose any money permanently. Respawning the gems might have been worth considering more seriously.
Lots of helpful feedback, thank you for writing this!
Nice little game with a chill atmosphere. The core mechanic is really fun, and the visuals are nice. Great job on the sound design too (music seems to only be playing on the right speaker though?)
Some criticisms:
- I tried to slam into the jellyfish for quite a while before I realized there were other fish, probably because there is a jellyfish right on the text where it tells you to slam into fish.
- Takes too long to go back down after going up, that feels unresponsive.
- If you're on one HP, there's no way to recover because as soon as you shoot, you die.
- If I need to slam really quickly as soon as the harpoon hits, my instinct is to spam-click in that moment, but I end up canceling my slam.
Ahhh, my fellow connoisseurs of the oxygen-propulsion genre. I really like the idea and the level design, the gameplay is very unique and interesting. The visuals and audio are fantastic too.
I beat it with 36 holes punched, although I did completely glitch through the terrain :D Looks like bumping into a wall can increase your speed, so if you're right in-between two walls, you get launched to space. Was funny though. Beat it properly afterwards with 30 holes.
Criticisms:
- Panning back to spawn after dying is about 20x too slow.
- The bump sound is too loud.
- Limiting the view was a conscious decision right? I'd think it'd be more interesting if it was possible to plan ahead without learning the level.
- Movement speed varied a lot when there was no reason to. Maybe something wrong with time scaling?
Nice game! Looks good, and hitting the enemies feels satisfying. I like how you use the camera to indicate the level bounds.
Is the intention that you don't shoot at the eels? It seems like you can always get unlucky and miss them. Maybe they could have and indicator a second before they change direction.
I think it would be fun without a cooldown on the harpoon, since you can't spam it anyway.
Very simple, but the core mechanic is surprisingly fun! I really like how long the delay between shooting and actually hitting is, that makes it feel like I'm totally sniping them, or somehow like setting up a trap. That in combination with it being both possible and necessary to quickly switch targets during a volley to hit multiple enemies with one "shot", I think makes it a really strong mechanic. All of that hinges on randomly getting assigned a strong weapon though, which from what it looks like could happen right at the start or never at all, so that part needs some kind of progression I think. The movement feels smooth too, all in all this is super good work for your first jam IMO.