Deepsea Alchemy by Hugimugi7

[raw]
made by Hugimugi7 for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

sprite<em>deepsea-alchemy</em>cover.png


Excavate, transmutate.

Humanity has just succeeded in building a submarine which can withstand the pressures of the deepest parts of the sea. You play as the submarine deep underwater, complying and completing mission control's objectives. The seabed is filled with a variety of different minerals just waiting to be found and excavated.

Transmutating two different minerals produces new minerals and the surface awaits your work on delivering variety of transmutated minerals back to HQ.

section_marker01.png


LDCompo48<em>gif01.gif LDCompo48</em>gif02.gif

I love the smell of zirconium in the morning.

  • Seabed filled with minerals
  • Lots of dialogue
  • No panic, you cannot die
  • Automatic packages..!

Controls 🎮

  • Move: 'A' and 'D'
  • Excavate: Left mouse button
  • Collect: Right mouse button
  • Exit: Escapce
  • Toggle fullscreen: F11
  • Restart: f5
  • Fps counter: F1
  • Right mouse button on text for impatient players.

Note ❗

The game has a lot of content, please at least play a decent amount of it.
This is by far the longest game I've ever made for a jam, keep that in mind if you want to experience the whole thing.

Also made by myself, but couldn't make it for the COMPO category.


Changelog

[1.2] - Fixed game breaking bug where long distant package deliveries always get stuck.


section<em>marker</em>02.png

Ratings

Overall 746th 3.614⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Fun 859th 3.386⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 94th 4.114⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Theme 134th 4.25⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 686th 3.864⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Audio 881th 3.227⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1276th 3.227⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Given 24🗳️ 23🗨️

Feedback

Tiago Cruz
27. Apr 2021 · 22:52 UTC
Great game! I like the buoyancy and transmutation mechanics, but i think it would be cool if it had some music.
GarethTheDestro
27. Apr 2021 · 22:58 UTC
This is a really cool little game, I love exploring not only the environment but also what kinds of materials there are. I'll probably keep playing on this one to keep seeing what I can find. One piece of feedback I'll give is that the beginning tutorial feels really long. I didn't fully understand the buoyancy controls until I started playing and discovering it was really cool, really unique control decision for a submarine game. Great job!
funemaker
27. Apr 2021 · 23:06 UTC
Nice game...I like the 2d graphics and the buoyancy control was interesting. At first I was trying to be very careful not to touch anything, but then remembered you can't die so it was more fun to move around. Agree that the intro is a little long.
🎤 Hugimugi7
27. Apr 2021 · 23:54 UTC
I discovered a game-breaking bug that makes every single package stuck and fixed it immediately. (now live in version __1.2__)
__If you're playing 1.1, update to 1.2.__

Anyways, __the 'tutorial' might seem long but it was intended to be so.__
I wanted to make it more immersive and story-rich, so consider it to be a story game as well. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
LDJam user 245161
28. Apr 2021 · 00:02 UTC
The core mechanic of "laser something, then tractor beam it, but you can only hold one type at a time" or, zapping something above another element and intentionally letting it fall to combine, was the most compelling part to me. I feel like it could really benefit from "Overcooked"-like missions where the time constraint provides some challenge to keep things from getting boring.
Scruffylooking2121
28. Apr 2021 · 03:54 UTC
So much to like! I liked the floating controls. Figuring out how to corral some ore for later made me feel really proud of myself. The sound effects were well done. I appreciated the change in tone when multiple ores were tractored in one after another. I eventually learned what ore was what, but it might have been helpful if a mouseover of raw ore would identify it. I played it for a long time and wanted to keep playing. Very nice job. The graphics look nice and I liked your take on the theme. For a game without much danger presented, I almost panicked when a hard-earned carbonite rolled off a ledge into the abyss!
Shin0nome
29. Apr 2021 · 13:37 UTC
Great game it's fun ! I really liked the intro with the storytelling / objectives on the notebook. The game mechanic was fun too with a good atmoshpere. Good job !
flaquero
29. Apr 2021 · 13:47 UTC
The mechanics are very well executed, making for a really fun game!
hwaet
29. Apr 2021 · 13:59 UTC
I love the mechanics, but I agree the tutorial is too long. If you are going to make it into a bigger game, consider breaking the beginning up by making missions out of testing the movement controls. Your writing style is fantastic and goes a long way to fleshing out the world so I think you could get the same effect with less. Great game!
MaximeGammaitoni
29. Apr 2021 · 16:57 UTC
wow that work !!! physics is perfectly adjusted, with good feeling when i turn the weel to down or up !
Juste I had to give up because take obsidian + gold is to long and not sent to HQ because the send package was stuck (i dont now why) and self destruct. This is a chill game really. I play this when i want to relax. Like terraria or animal crossing haha. extremely great work guy ! one of my fav polished game
MicroChasm
29. Apr 2021 · 17:54 UTC
There is something relaxing about mining in a safe environment. While I would like to have some more quality of life additions, like the ability to view the name of a rock by holding shift, or the ability to hold more than one type of rock, in a way it was cool to have to mine rocks, collect them, and remember where they were. The thing that I found that was pretty frustrating was that compounds that you have made can recombine with their constituent elements, so that they can become useless as you are trying to carefully build a stockpile of the needed minerals. If this is expanded, I'd love to see some nice effects around the mining-- if the mining is enjoyable to do, maybe the rocks crumble in a satisfying way, nice particles, nice sounds, etc, it would make this a really pleasant experience. I liked the bouyancy controls-- while simple directional controls would have been more intuitive, having to spin a wheel makes it feel like you are controlling a submarine instead of a regular game character. Good idea, and a cool space to interact with.
JavaSaurus
29. Apr 2021 · 20:03 UTC
I like this game, it is relaxing and very enjoyable. The physics feel very natural and it doesn't feel too repetitive to gather materials. Well done, thanks for making this ! The intro text was quite the read but it all made sense. Definitely going to replay this ! I love the look of the game, it has a certain terraria feel to it, especially the items that drop.
Honest Dan
30. Apr 2021 · 13:48 UTC
You have clearly put a lot of effort into the mood and environment. It feels really authentic, but the downside is that it ends up bombarding the player with too much info before they get a chance to try out the game. Generally speaking, it may be nicer to stagger the explanation of the game mechanics. Introduce a mechanic > Let them try > introduce a new mechanic > let them try. Otherwise, you risk that they may have forgotten mechanic 1 and 2 by the time you've gotten to your long 5 mechanic intro.

That aside, it was a cool and novel mechanic. I liked the navigation of the ship, I liked the restriction of only being able to collect one type of mineral. I enjoyed the merging of different types of molecules too. I think the mechanics were solid and it was really well presented.
LDJam user 240168
01. May 2021 · 08:39 UTC
The concept & mechanics are really, really cool. Sadly, the amount of text and the fact that it slowly appears letter by letter, made the game almost non-playable for me. 20 minutes in-game and I barely did anything interesting, most of the time just waiting for the text to finish so that I could skip it, just to get another piece of text to wait and skip. I see that you've put a lot of work in this text for creating a certain atmosphere; I'd advise to use other, more effective atmosphere-creating means (like music) first, and then concentrating on the narration. You could make the text skippable for impatient players like me, e.g. add a button that immediately shows the next mission objective, and maybe add a way to skip the tutorial completely. I'd still suggest cutting on the text a little - e.g. there were 3 (if I'm not mistaken) pages about packages being stuck and that the player would receive a notification on that and that he should keep an eye on that. All that seems completely unnecessary to me: players know that if something pops up on the screen, it's probably important; and they'll quickly learn about this notifications as soon as the first one appears. So, let the players play & expore, they're very good learners.

Anyways, the game clearly has potential, the mechanics are super cool and I'd love to give it another try at some point.

Btw, I noticed a lot of `tilemap_get() - couldn't find specified tilemap` and `Too many manifolds in collision` messages in the logs, hope this helps!
Guiditooo
03. May 2021 · 19:25 UTC
Where to start ...
A very good idea to use the minerals from the seabed to make sense of the game.
Regarding the gameplay, it is quite difficult to move the character; but it's a pretty cool mechanic.
Regarding art, I like it. The work of pixelart, it shows that it is well done.
Regarding the tutorial, it is true that it is long. But he takes the luxury of explaining how the game works in its entirety. It is preferable that it is long, that it does not have; and that is a plus point.
Regarding sound effects. The typewriter on the pad is very satisfying to listen to. The rest accompany and do not bother.
For a job done in such a short time, it's a marvel, one of the best I've seen.
Bajtix
03. May 2021 · 23:45 UTC
Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to get too far, because I had to move on during the livestream. I think the mechanic are really interesting, they force you not only to think about what resources you have but also where you have them. You also gotta be careful with them not to create something accidentally. The pixelart is really nice and clean and, just as some people before me have mentioned, the sound effects of the typewriter create a nice mood. Great job, very polished game!
Zuwu
04. May 2021 · 04:58 UTC
Super fun, I really had a blast playing this one. I cant think of anything that NEEDS to be changed, but there are a couple of things. One of them is about the carbonite, it could combine to form diamonds and then form carbonite again, all from the resources you use to make it in the first place, so frequently when I tried to mass produce carbonite I would get 30% to 50% of what I had in resources because of this little loop, It was small thing but it ended up costing me a fair bit of time. It would be nice if there was something to do while floating around too, like having a music track play in the background or maybe a richer background, but all of these of just little things and even without them the game is still super fun.
BluishGreenPro
04. May 2021 · 21:38 UTC
Thanks for submitting this game to my stream! As I mentioned on stream, I would really appreciate having an image of the ore I'm looking for and perhaps a codex to remind me of what elements combine to form what result.
Miklo
16. May 2021 · 19:55 UTC
I always had a thing for underwater-themed games. The game looks and plays extremely well! Great job!
ledgrealed
14. Aug 2022 · 06:10 UTC
This game is great. 0.39 inch [3391AW](http://www.xlitx.com/datasheet/3391AW.pdf) led [3391AW](http://www.lanpade.com/7-segment-led-dot-matrix/3391aw.html) 7-segment [3391BW](http://www.xlitx.com/datasheet/3391BW.pdf) display [3391BW](http://www.lanpade.com/7-segment-led-dot-matrix/3391bw.html)