Last Breath by Adrenallen
Last Breath is a game about exploring a procedurally generated cave as it floods with water.
PLEASE NOTE - Chrome or desktop version is HIGHLY recommended. The audio has significant problems in other browsers.
PLAY IT HERE
This is my fifth Ludum Dare entry and my first one that I actually slept 8 hours both nights :stuckouttongue: I really enjoyed how this one turned out, and wish I had another few days to work on it before submission. I challenged myself to not add combat to this game, and I think it worked out well!
Follow me on Twitter to see future projects
Controls
Movement - WASD or Arrow Keys
Cycle Items - Q
Use Items - E
Mute Sound - M
Theme
With the theme being "delay the inevitable" I thought of a rising tide that cannot be stopped. My take in this game is that you are rushing to collect as much treasure and see as much as you can before you eventually perish in the flood.
Gameplay
Last Breath is different than many other games I've made, and has much more emphasis on exploration. While there is a leaderboard, the game is much better enjoyed just running around and trying to find all 7 of the pre-fabs that can be spawned across the cave. You must use your ladder, bomb, and pick to mine and climb through the sometimes difficult terrain.
Tips for playing
- You cannot mine upwards, but you CAN use your bomb to clear upwards.
- Ladder launches are a "feature" :wink:
- You cannot place ladders while in the air, unless you are climbing on something else
- Ladders and water negate fall damage
Screenshots
Tools used
Art
- Aseprite
- GIMP
Code
- Godot 3.4
- VSCode
Sound Effects
- Various open license ambient noise clips modded and spliced for the right cave sounds :smiley:
- jsfxr
- ChipTone
- Audacity
Hosting
- Gitlab pages
- Itch.io
Continuous Deployment
- Gitlab CI/CD
Leaderboard
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- Digital Ocean App Platform
Known bugs
- Some prefabs may place over eachother
- Seeds are not exactly repeatable, need to centralize the RNG system so it works.
- Some browsers struggle with the sound effects and cause nearly unplayable sound lag. You can mute or more recommended is to use Chrome.
- The game can lag as too many water tiles are placed eventually. Desktop version helps a lot.
Cut Content
- Drill item pickup for quicker mining
- More variance in score item pickups besides the two implemented
- Ride-able minecarts and tracks
- Randomly placed torches that can be picked up and used and also go out when submerged in water
- Glowstick items
- Other types of liquids
- Harpoon rope/grapple thing to cross gaps or climb upwards better
- Usable player item pickups throughout the cave
- Autotile the cave tiles to look better
- Revamp mining system to allow for easier implementation of additional tile types
- A base "rising water" line that goes up every few seconds. This would force the player to eventually drown no matter how clever they get.
Post Submission Changelog
- Fixed typo in end-game screen
- Adjusted audio levels for background ambience track
- Fixed bug causing minecart prefabs to never spawn
- Added hotkey to start game immediately from the menu (press space/enter)
- Fixed cave names being cut-off on leaderboard
Ratings
| Given | 24🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
Overall, I like the concept and I wish I could have enjoyed it more.
The water physics could use some optimizing but I didn't get back around to it. Maybe try the desktop version if you want to give it another spin. I should probably add a "tiny map mode" for people that have lag so they can atleast get an idea of the game even if it's a smaller experience...
Thanks for trying it!
It is working now!
Thanks for the quick feedback! I wonder if something is just configured wrong in my installation of chrome...
I really like the water physics and the way the sticks of dynamite work. It is very satisfying to blow rocks up!
Nice work!
@mnikn I went back and forth on adding music. I settled on leaving it with the cave ambience because I felt like it had the biggest impact on that feeling of a desolate cave.
If I went music I think I'd have to somehow gauge the player situation and if they are in danger. Then I could go from more chill music to something intense as the player is scrambling to survive. Short of that I was worried it might cause some disconnect between the game and player, so given time I went with just the ambience and the rushing water/underwater sound effects.
After feedback it seems like maybe just some chill music would have been a better choice though :)
Congrats! Cool game for the short period of time!
Great tutorial! Made me instantly know exactly what was going on. Perhaps the water could flow more quickly? Falling was a much more real and present danger.
Still, cell fluid physics are no joke especially with such good performance, an impressive effort for 48 hours! great work
@captaincarrot haha I do love Godot. Normally I try to style the default button themes so it feels like asset re-usey but time didn't allow for this one!
Thanks for the kind words. I also felt like drowning wasn't as much of a threat as I wanted. I actually wanted to avoid having fall damage originally so you could really just run around but it ended up not being challenging enough.
I'm planning to strip out the water engine and make it a reusable scene anyone can plug into a tilemap for their own game!
The idea is really creative.
Being trapped in a water filling cave and staying alive as long as possible.
The water physics look great.
One thing you could improve is the UI.
It doesn't really stand out and is just the Godot Standard Theme.
For example in the tutorial, the exit button is hidden in plain sight.
It's dark and places on a dark background in a random location where you wouldn't expect an exit button.
Place it at the top left and give it some color :)
The screen maximize is a simple project setting tweak, I will make sure I do that in the future @wavertron !
I talked about it earlier in the comments too but I totally agree @finn-pickart . I normally try to clear the default Godot themes but just ran out of time for this one! I should have made the exit button on tutorial more obvious though, agreed. Thanks again for the feedback!
Suggestions/Issues:
+ Full-screen mode doesn't actually full screen the game. I was using windows 7 and chrome
+ Possibly adding the capability to pickaxe above you
@kitkii I'm glad you enjoyed the ladder jumps, I thought they were fun too so I didn't remove the physics oddity :smile: I totally agree I wish I had more explorables in there! I wanted to add rideable minecarts but ran out of time, that and more larger prefabs like the egg spawn. I also wanted to add more trap type interactions throughout the cave. Time made me cut most of those ideas :cry: I did consider adding health pickups throughout the cave. I decided I liked it being harder in the end. I think what I'd do for health is add a specific prefab you could find that would potentially heal you something like 10% health, something very small but beneficial. Thanks for the feedback!
@vixenmink It seems most people blow themselves up with the dynamite at first. I probably should have added a label or something :laughing: Seems to be pretty funny though so it works! As for full-screen, yes I am sorry about that! It's a configuration change mostly and something I will make sure I address on future games. As for digging up, it was a conscious decision to leave it out. The main reason being that I didn't want people to dig tiny air pockets to escape the flooding waters. To try and counter this, I made sure the dynamite would explode high enough to dig sort of upwards. In the end I think it was okay, but the biggest problem I found from playtesting is that it encourages players to navigate down, then going back up is pretty painful and tedious. If I were to do this again, I'd consider some kind of alteration to the water system that would simulate water pressure. Something like by filling 1x1 areas above full water cells slowly so that it would flood upwards. Or something to the tune of that. I did make my water physics system a plugin for Godot, and that's something I plan to play with in the future for other people's games. You can see it here [https://github.com/adrenallen/WaterMap](https://github.com/adrenallen/WaterMap) Maybe I can solve the problem of water pressure entirely and simulate it properly to avoid the air pocket strategy in games like this. Thanks for the feedback!
@zimny11 Yeah LOL. So I actually originally wanted to have the dynamite give you a boost at the expense of a bit of health, but I couldn't get it to feel right so I scrapped it in the final version. Glad you liked the game, thanks for playing!