Deeper Well by Feraligatr

Summary
In "Deeper Well" you can build your own small town. The main source of food and the center of your population is a small but not inconspicuous well in the middle of the city. In the beginning you have only a few resources and farmers at your disposal. But the more your city grows, the more you can build. To continue to supply your population, you must dig the well deeper and deeper. This is the only way to keep them alive.
Controls
WASD - Camera Movement
R - Rotating when building
With the FastForward buttons you can manipulate the Timescale (1x, 2x, 4x).
Team
Our second LDJam and fourth in sum now.
Milmalissa - Digital Artist - responsible for all the art you see, from models, to textures to UI Elements.
manio - Music Director - he composed the soundtrack.
ThePeat/Feraligatr - Lead Developer - implementing the architecture, UI and features. If you have turned into our stream, you have seen him doing his work.
Foreign Assets
Font - Enchanted Land (https://www.dafont.com/enchanted-land.font) Stone Street & Dirt Street Texture - "Five Seamless Tileable Ground Textures"
| Link | https://nidavellirgames.itch.io/deeper-well |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deeper-well |
Ratings
| Overall | 332th | 3.882⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 740th | 3.456⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 819th | 3.294⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1332th | 3.294⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 959th | 3.647⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 371th | 3.765⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 737th | 2.897⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 960th | 3.469⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
@slingshot To unlock other buildings, you have to upgrade the well. Each upgrade provides you with a reward, for example new buildings :) I will be happy if you would return and try upgrading the well so you can feel the settlers vibe more :)
Neat little game, im just not sure if i even needed roads.
Being able to place multiple of some tile (especially roads) instead of having to select them again after each placement would definitely add some quality of life to it.
But overall, nice game. ^^
I also liked how the tutorial was done through the encounter with a villager, it was such a neat idea.
Another thing I liked was the shader when I was placing a new building, it was very pleasing to look at and clear.
I feel like a lack of ambient occlusion is really holding back your 3D models since they look very nice otherwise.
Something to note is that the constant change in rate is confusing and unintuitive. For example I open up my well and it makes 1 water every 20 seconds but my farmer house tells me that it consumes 0.25 water a minute. I can't quickly and easily glance at this and figure it out, albeit it's not too hard to figure out 1 water / 20 sec = 3 water per minute it's a lot to keep track of.
Something that's borderline quality of life but I think is still important is some indication about your resource trends, an up/down arrow or more importantly something like +0.30/min next to say the water as this allows me to glance up and tell what I can afford and when I need more.
I was really impressed with the complexity of the game for the given time period!
Perhaps it was night mode on my monitor - I need it to help ward off headaches 😬 - and I will look at it tomorrow but for me the contrast between objects that weren't unlocked and were wasn't great, especially for things like stone which I expect to be grey and the fact that the tooltip pops up and informs me about the object but says nothing about it's status is a bit misleading as well. Again, given the time period this is 100% a nitpick but something to keep in mind in the future. I feel like feedback is important for improving as a developer, less so the actual game as many of us don't update our games post jam (Though there are of course some that do!)
I must admit: I left the tab open in the background while I did the dishes because I wanted to listen to the music more. It's so calming and soothing and I quite love it.
Anyway this is getting pretty long and I've only managed well lvl 1 so far, but it's rather late and I need to recover some sleep so I'm going to call this part 1, play some more tomorrow (or the day after depending on how busy I am) and then I'll have a little part 2 when I've completed the game because it just seems wrong to give feedback when I haven't even played through the whole game!
(Part 1/2)
Really cool interpretation of the theme.
Well, that's deep
A few things I noted in my final little bit of playing:
It would have been nice to have some way to cancel buildings but a minor inconvenience provided I get the stuff back when demolishing.
Perhaps I missed it but I wish you had mentioned that holding shift increased the speed of the camera, it would have been super helpful to me earlier on.
As for fast forward there was no consequence for accelerating time so it was a no-brainer just to leave it on the fastest.
A few times I overexpanded and lost some citizens... I think? There wasn't a whole lot of feedback regarding that which I wish there was more.
Overall I think that was everything. I really loved this game, super cute!
(Part 2/2)
Wish the game luck!
PS: more well puns would've been nice.
Other than that very pleasent experience.
https://youtu.be/O7jRN1j3y2A?t=3006
P.S. "Well that was deep"
It has a few game breaking bugs but nothing you couldn't work around for example "ESC" kill the game and it doesn't work on small screens. Also at least on my (old and low end) there seemed to be quite a bit of lag but that could just be me.
As for the game the UX definitely needs a bit of work using "ESC" to close windows and being able to place multiple buildings and move them would be nice. As for the UI a way to see how much resources my "town" is using would go a really long way as well as making the locked buildings a bit more obvious, I would also like to see a reason to not always be at 4x speed because right now there doesn't seem to be one as well as some other restrictions because the game ends pretty quick. Giving the streets a function would also be nice.
Everyone is commenting on the music but I think that the graphics are the best part (not that the music isn't amazing). On the topic of sound, the fact that there is no sound when a building is placed (and other SFX) is pretty obvious.
On an other note thank you for giving us the ability to skip the tutorial and continue playing after the game ended, I cannot tell you how much I appreciated those.
Also could you really not think of something better than "Well, that’s deep"
I know that the above seams like a lot of criticism but I loved the game and it's a job well done, the only reason I go to so much detail and "nitpick" is because I would like to see a full game and I think that the feedback may be useful.
_well that's deep_ :wink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsMPyOopzzU
Sorry for no game audio - OBS somehow stopped recording the computer audio without me noticing, but I could hear the audio just fine when I was playing it.
The music really makes waiting for the counters to tick up a calm exercise. There are some alignment and clipping things that I'd want a future version to improve, but this is a fun and very playable game as is. I appreciate the right click cancel on buildings, too! Thanks for bringing this to my queue for after stream way back in the first week of playtesting. (Also, well, that's deep.)