Dumb Ways To Dive by Jonas Michael
We're having a barbecue down here. Why don't you come join us?
Our teams' entry into this round of Ludum Dare's game jam is called Dumb Ways To Dive. We've tried to make a more humorous approach to the competition this time, especially since we had trouble coping with the theme. Your goal is to rescue your friend with a peculiar name, who has dived to the bottom of a lake with no chance of getting back up. However, be aware of what is lurking in the depths!
We've tried to add as many details and gimmicks to graphics, dialogue, characters and sound as we could possibly fit in - resulting in the last few hours being extremely stressful because we were still encountering game-breaking bugs, especially with our WebGL version.
We hope you enjoy our game as much as we enjoyed making it - even though we may not have picked the most original idea for the given theme.
Thank you for playing!
@der-finski (Coding)
@jonas-michael (Coding)
@hanna-knop (Art and Animations)
@odyze (Coding, Art and Animations)
@c42 (Music, Sound and UI)
@MelonFace (Coding, Dialogue and Art)
PS: v.1.1 now online, featuring bugfixes for the end scene and dialogue boxes!
| Link | https://ukuleleontrumpet.itch.io/dumb-ways-to-dive |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dumb-ways-to-dive |
Ratings
| Overall | 1264th | 3.316⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 940th | 3.327⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1663th | 2.604⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 511th | 3.936⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1151th | 3.469⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 643th | 3.5⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 501th | 3.221⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1195th | 3.283⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 63🗨️ |
Well done :)
Controls are not responsive, especially dash, doubletap works or doesn't work, something wrong with that, if you can, fix it please!
And something wrong with screen scaling, because in fullscreen, half of the game was cutted off, in windowed mode I needed to scale my browser to see all game(
And one more, after I finished swimming, there was a part I've diving down and down, time was stopped, but everything was worked, except I saw nothing and character was on the bottom of the screen, and I couldn't pickup any items :/ Is this part of the game?
So cool graphic and soundtrack) Relaxing game)
The text boxes were too fast at some points for me to read them :(
The difficulty curve was a bit odd, since I found the first part, with the homing fish, the hardest area, and after that avoiding the passive fish was much easier. I enjoyed seeing the new fish designs as I went deeper though.
I think I got to the end? I saw what looked like the bottom of the lake, but I swam past it and continued going down in absolute darkness. Kind of intense!
I also couldn't get doubletap to work, but didn't really need it!
Is there a way to win the game? I think I saw someone at ~960m but barely missed him.
Also I don't know if it's on purpose but the backwards swimming sharks are hilarious!
The game doesn't communicate a lot of things clearly. At first I thought I died to the worms since I ran out of oxygen at the same time I touched one. Addittionally, it took me a couple of tries to notice that swimming fast drains oxygen, which meant that on some runs I died before I could even reach an oxygen tank. As others have mentioned, the double dash isn't responsive. Additionally, the music was pretty low, took me a while to notice the game even had tunes. I'm glad I noticed, since it was quite catchy.
The idea is not the most original in the world but it is really well executed, nice to play, and your personnal touch on this idea is great.
My favorite features: The school of fish looked really cool; anyone who actually did night diving knows that lights and shadows do look like that under water - those shadows were a great addition; and the reverse swimming sharks are just hilarious!
A few bugs I encountered:
- probably the reverse swimming sharks :laughing:
- The dialogue while in water always disappeared the second it popped up
- I think I saw Deapah near the ground, but just swam by without anything happening or the option to stop or reverse
- As I reached the ground I swam right through it, where water continued and Deeper being stuck to the bottom third of the screen
If you're interested in the fish-(and far better)-version of social media, feel free to check out, what we have going on @beebo-studios! :fish:
Cheers!
Also, the dash currently has a short cooldown in order to not make it OP :D
If you have completed the game (as in when the timer stops :D) please feel free to share your speedrun time! Unfortunately we couldnt include a highscore / speedrun board in time...
I loved the "sea life"
However, after passing 1000 points, my camera got stuck like this, leading to a pretty fast game over:
That's the only glitch I noticed though. GG!
I am glad to announce that we were able to publish v 1.1, where we handled some bugs you have encountered. The following changes were made in particular:
- shark no longer swims backwards
- size of enemies now matches enemies further down
- fixed displaying the end scene at 1000m depth
- fixed display of dialogue
If you want, you can replay our game now and enjoy it in the scope that was intended during development! I hope without the mentioned bugs the game becomes a lot more enjoyable to you!
Thank you all for playing, voting and commenting!
Overall, this was a very fun and relaxing game that I felt compelled to play to the end. Good jam game, well done! :)
The audio is really nice and the gameplay, too. Graphics look pleasing.
Some things that bothered me a bit:
- It is hard to follow the dialogue during the gameplay
- Controls could be a bit more responsive (sometimes when i dash to one side to collect oxygen I just can get one of the three.)
- I could be wrong but it seemed like the hitbox of the enemies did not always match the sprite.
What I liked the most:
- The music fits really good with the game and sets the right mood. Bonus points for music change!
- The lighting works really good!
- Funny jokes
Good job! Thanks for sharing!