itch.io

Nicely done, a mesmerizing experience! A little unsettling at first. I think it's mainly the fog and not knowing what's coming, though I think the heavy fog probably adds to the experience overall, because you focus more on the sounds when you can't see anything. One nit is not being able to do a full loop since the mouse only goes fully around in a vertical direction, like FPS controls. I wonder if you tried flight controls? Anyway, good stuff!

Ah space makes a big difference, yeah it's missing from tutorial so I never tried it.

Also I think the main challenge of this game is that it is a maze, and you will always know the way as the creator of the map, so you can't really know how challenging it is until you playtest it :).

Great artwork, nice concept with the doors and the platforming switching on/off.

I have a lots of feedback but it's all small things I promise!

I fell off the last level on the far right, I thought there was a secret maybe below, and I think there was? But I didn't land on the lower floor and kept falling forever so I was stuck (no worries it's a jam). I think it would have been good to lower the gravity to make the platforming feel more watery. Oh yeah and picking up the speaker didn't work the first 1 or 2 times for some reason. Since there's only one item in the game you could just auto pick up when close. :)

Last thing, with the great art it's a shame that fullscreen is disabled, is it intentional? I think you can enable it on the itch settings.

Well done and congrats on the entry!

Great artwork, nice concept with the doors and the platforming switching on/off.

I have a lots of feedback but it's all small things I promise!

I fell off the last level on the far right, I thought there was a secret maybe below, and I think there was? But I didn't land on the lower floor and kept falling forever so I was stuck (no worries it's a jam). I think it would have been good to lower the gravity to make the platforming feel more watery. Oh yeah and picking up the speaker didn't work the first 1 or 2 times for some reason. Since there's only one item in the game you could just auto pick up when close. :)

Last thing, with the great art it's a shame that fullscreen is disabled, is it intentional? I think you can enable it on the itch settings.

Well done and congrats on the entry!

I just reopened the game just to see if I could figure it out with fresh eyes, and I did pretty quickly this time. Last time I kept trying to drag the speaker and rotate it  (as though I'm picking it up with the cursor) and the rotation seemed arbitrary, and when I clicked far away I didn't connect the dots. Maybe just me, but might help to have an arrow or line visible showing the connection between the cursor and the speaker. Also I feel like it would be more intuitive if you click where you want to go rather than where the speaker points, especially since you're close to the bottom of the screen (i.e. 180 degrees where it is now). Again maybe just me though!

Didn't finish it but got a lot further then fell all the way. :D Well done!

Lots to like here, from the pixel art and the prof character to the concepts of the gameplay. I completely missed that you're supposed to collect specific things, so I collected everything at least twice before realizing that you're only supposed to get what it tells you in the top left. I got a few more after that but it felt endless at that point (after about 4 eels and 4 angler fish). Not sure if there's an ending or not. Would be cool to see more, especially with more unique behaviors (maybe even dangers/attacks) for each fish. unique sounds per fish, etc. Great project overall, nice work!

I liked the concept and the music. On my first run I died within a minute to a fish that was offscreen when I placed the first speaker (just to see what it did). Second run went really really far, and I was surprised by how massive the map is. I don't think the size of the map is a positive unfortunately, since it's the first map and I had no idea how much further. I died to a random fish in a corner after like 15 minutes which was very frustrating.

Fish are difficult in a non-fun way imo... They should either die or at least stop for a while after doing damage to you. Especially with the huge map, it's crazy that I would die in under 5 seconds after 15 minutes of searching. Other than that, the speakers were not particularly useful, in fact they seemed more dangerous than useful. I only used a couple as breadcrumbs since there are very few landmarks in the game, everything kinda looks the same. If they had like 5X their current light radius, that might be something to use strategically. They're barely brighter than the sub and don't move so they ended up being useless imo.

Anyway, very well done for the short time of the jam, and I hope this feedback is helpful!

Sure but when in-game that's not communicated to the player in any way, making it vague. But yeah I think it would have been fine to not show directly to the player if the monster was better balanced.

Ah controls were fine, ironic that I was vague there myself. :D

Anyway, I meant it was a bit too vague how the fish behaved since they're off-screen, and there was a lot of variance between what I did and what the fish did in response (e.g. after a few seconds of my first usage of the siren, I used the small call, and small fish kept going away, and when i used it again, the monster came back and not the small fish. So I guess was also vague what strategy I should use.

Thank you so much! I'm quite happy that I got the tech to work (with some AI help on the perspective projection math), but I might be equally proud that I thought of using those high detail scans of seashells as the map itself which I think helped a ton too giving everything a naturally organic underwater feel. It's kind of a shame I had to hide them for the gameplay to make sense, here's what they look like in blender.

Nice work, cool concept, I didn't mind the randomness of it, but it was a bit too vague maybe, and I failed when I tried because I kept having to scare away the monster so the fish would scare with it.

Extremely impressive visuals and art! I like the concept and the level design, and for me the performance was solid in full screen. But I didn't really get the right click rotation logic. I really wanted to keep playing to see the whole thing, but got too frustrated. I don't mind difficult or even some rage stuff if I screw up, but not understanding the basic controls after trying for several minutes isn't my type of fun. If I don't feel like I can improve with practice then it's not something I'd keep playing for long. As a counter example, Spelunky 1/2 are very difficult and it can be frustrating to die after a lot of good progress, but it mostly felt like my "fault", and indeed with more play I got better at those games until I beat them.

Anyway, great job still, I think if you make the controls more obvious to understand (not necessarily easier) I think this could be a commercial game!

Thank you!

Regarding boring, yeah totally... I had ideas for a character who tells you about the quest and you would have to bring the gems to him, and thought it would be cool to have enemies that have fixed routes that you need to avoid with sonar (if you visually see them, it's too late). But implementing the effect took about half the jam time, so I barely had time to make the level, implement the basics, etc. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Great project! Tight controls, nice art and music, solid concept and reasonable difficulty. Rolling is tough to pull off consistently, but I think that's good otherwise it would go on forever. I got 631!

Haha this is awesome!! Whyyyyyy!!!

Cool gameplay choices (mostly... why does it ask if I'm sure??), but I loved the whacky story and art and visuals especially. Well done!

Great job! Was confusing the first time but not too bad, a bit harsh to run out of bombs/speakers IMO. I lost to the thing that happens when you get all the things even though i had lots of stuff saved up :(. Also picking up stuff a bit too difficult in terms of placing the ship in the right place (pick up radius too small IMO). Anyway, cool concept and nicely executed!

Thanks for the nice words! Yes indeed the planned (and slightly prototyped) gameplay didn't make it in the end. Blame "game jam dev me" and not "game engine dev me", I just didn't use my time well enough. :)

Btw, you may be interested to know that I just updated the template project (for those who don't know, here's the demo and repo) to include dynamic physics for explosions/debris!

Weird, seems to work for most folks. If you feel like it, maybe try in a different browser if you have one handy (though it's a minimal experience so no worries if not)

Well done, solid first showing!

I understood right away the very start, but I couldn't figure out what was running out or why/when. I tried to click each thing a few times then move in a circle, and then I'd suddenly lose and it wasn't clear why.

It's well made and nicely presented but quite tough... if the balls fell straight down (slowly) it would be easier to think of what to press, but I guess that's just guitar hero then. Was difficult to try to make my brain press the right key though.

Very cool! Looks great, was kinda confused after tutorial even though I've played solitaire, but once I started playing I got it relatively quickly. Main criticism is the suit icons are way too tiny on desktop. It's important gameplay info and I need to strain my eyes a lot to see it. Otherwise great job, I'd play this if the balance felt decent ( I didn't play long enough to find out).

Thanks very much! :)

That was fun, great job! Levels ending abruptly was my only real complaint, it's hard to tell what the progress (i.e. how much left to eat in that level before it's considered done), and then suddenly the level pops away. Totally fine for jam though and I'm guessing you're aware but in case you're not. :) Anyway, great work!

Thank you! Using our own engine (own physics lib, ECS, etc) along with threejs as the rendering library. Some materials are pure threejs (the ant, the metal pipes) and some are shaders that i wrote or customized (the projectiles/smoke/sand).

Hey thank you so much!

If I were to guess, there's probably an assumption made somewhere about angle going from 0 to pi or something like that, when in practice, depending on the operation, it may go from 0 to 2*pi or from -pi to pi. That has bit stung me many times!

Thank you! Didn't get a chance to add audio in time unfortunately, and yeah the controls are functional but definitely rough around the edges especially the shooting distance. Anyway, thanks for kind words and for playing! :)

Thank you!

Thanks very much! :)

Yeah the "loss state" if you can call it that is very poorly done, thrown in at the very end. Thanks for the nice comment and for playing! :)

Ah you're right sometimes it seems to get stuck on that loading screen. Not sure why, but if I continue the project I will fix it, thanks for playing and for the detailed report! :)

Wow, so you did all these high quality illustrations for/during this jam? You're super talented! Gameplay is quite simple but that kind of fits, the star of the show is the illustration work. Separately, I can really see these characters go really well with some nice story-based game, e.g. a point and click adventure.

Nicely put together in general, the controls could have been tighter especially for level 5. Would highly recommend showing something when the player hovers with the mouse indicating what would happen when the player clicks, before clicking. Canceling commands is slow which also makes it a bit frustrating at times when you put both those things together (mistakes easily happen, and not easy enough to fix). Well done overall, congrats on the submission!

Yes it was fun and engaging for a while, a decent challenge without being too difficult overall, and the concept is a good one overall of growing and protecting your base. If you plan to keep working on it, I could see something like thronefall-style upgrades being very interesting in a game like this, where you choose different structures for different branches, e.g. automatically protect half your tree while the other half generates more essence for you while you protect it yourself. Oh yeah and I would say abilities like shooting and repairing should have a bit of a cooldown otherwise easy to cheese. Great job overall for sure!

Thank you! :)

Very impressive stuff for the jam! The art is great and generally easy to read, and there's a lot in there that works well. I'd say the platforming itself is a bit weak (I know this is difficult), I would have preferred one less mechanic in favor of improving that I think. Another thing is it's not clear if it would ever end, which makes it so there's less incentive to continue, but I played until the tree was super massive at level 12 (the tree's growth is cool!). Great job!

It's a cool little game, and it's nice that you have an editor in a game jam entry! Music is too loud and not adjustable (not a huge deal), and it feels a bit bad when there's no way to not take dmg to collect some of the coins (i.e. the only to get to them is through a trap). Congrats on your submission!

Heh yeah it's awful and absolute minimum possible version of it. I put the two alerts in less than 30 minutes before the end :D. Thanks for the kind words and for playing! :)

Even though I don't know what's going on exactly, it was funny to destroy everything by lobbing people :D. Just slightly sad I was not rewarded for destroying the whole town :)

Not sure if it's a bug or me not getting it, but I couldn't do anything. It looks like a really cool concept and simulation but I tried clicking everything, different mouse buttons and mouse wheel, tried lots of keys including wasd and arrows and space etc, but nothing would happen in the game. Hope you can fix it, or if it's me please add an explanation to the instructions!