Submersible by kleinzach
Explore a submerged cave system from within a small enclosed submarine. WASD to look around the submarine. Click on buttons with the mouse to interact with them (Controls are shown in the first of the pictures below). Hold Esc to quit the game.
I'm mainly experimenting with a couple of things this jam:
First is procedural generation of levels to create a large amount of visual variety with a small number of assets. I'm a programmer, so I want to use that skill set to develop the look of my game. On top of that I'm going with 3D because I feel like simple art goes much farther in 3D rather then 2D, at least for me.
Second is making something that could potentially work with VR (Though I haven't ported it to any headset yet).
Third I didn't want to rely on any combat mechanics. Instead I wanted to focus on the environment of the game and light exploration. The game doesn't have any action, or score or anything of that nature as I feel that I too often make the same kind of "Arcadey" thing every jam.
Lastly, I'm going for a design style where I get the framework for the game in very quickly, and leave myself the majority of the time adding in polish. A simple framework with lots of flexibility means that I will have something by the end of the jam no matter what, and I can have something playable at any stage of the process.
I hope you all enjoy the game!
(PS. I Can't guarantee that the game will run well on most PCs. I only have mine to test it on, and it does a lot of rendering. If it turns out to run slow on a good number of machines, I can put out a post-compo version which culls some of details to make it run a little better. I would tie that in with the Unity quality settings, but I only thought of that later.)
Links:
Can someone let me know if the Linux and OSX builds work? I have no way to test them.
Source Code (Unity Assets Folder)
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/submersible |
Ratings
| Overall | 129th | 3.69⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 329th | 3.034⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 99th | 3.655⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 300th | 3.31⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 122th | 3.862⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 419th | 1.905⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 27th | 4.069⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
Well done on this. If you added some kind of focus to the game it could EASILY be a top greenlight game on Steam. I'm amazed that you got this done in 48 hours. I went in thinking cool another Jam submission by a team. Then once I actually read it's just one person and with 24 hours less haha.
First game I've wanted to view the source code from so far. I hope to learn some stuff from your entry.
I enjoyed the controls, I don't think it would work as well with standard WASD controls, maybe they could be revised further but this manual form of movement is really nice!
I hope you do work on this more and hopefully do get VR working because this atmospheric type games are my favorite for VR. Good job with this and good luck!
Graphics is not on Crysis levels, but it looks nice. As I said before, ship doesn't really give you feeling like you're in submarine.
If you continue your work, then this game can become something really nice.
It was quite an immersive experience - the extra layer of sitting in a sub, and having to navigate though button presses worked really well. From a UX perspective, as have been mentioned by others, I think that the controls would feel a bit smoother, if the buttons could be "held down", instead of having to click them rapidly.
The procedural generation created sufficient variety so that the exploration did not feel boring, although few extra variants of fauna would be nice. Can the path to the exit of a level become obstructed? In my first playthrough, i did not find the exit, and it was not until I read through the other comments, that I realized that the game had multiple levels, and when I tried again, I found the exits just fine. Although it is entirely possible that I just got lost the first time.
The sounds fitted well together with the rest of the simulation - in particular, using the engine noise as a substitute for a speed gauge.
I'd say that your experiments were successful!
>Just me and my sub.
>Exploring the pretty caves.
>Alas! No Nessie
The controls felt a little unintuitive; I repeatedly forgot I had to click-click-click them and expected holding them down to work.
It would be cool to have some rare, larger weirdos out there to discover to add to the feeling that there just might be something out there beyond the shadow of what I can see.
Very cool game. Unique take on the theme.
The controls were very interesting. They take getting use to, but after that, it's not that hard to navigate.
Graphics and lighting were nice, but I think adding very simple textures would make it look much better. By "simple" I mean something not highly detailed or colorful. Using grayscale textures can allow the meshes to keep their colors as is in the game (my textures in Caelium Alpha were not grayscale because I was too lazy :p).