The Mystery of Stalore-9 by Arthur Mairs
Play in full-screen for WebGL!
As rumours spread about the planet Stalore-9, "The planet where ships go missing". One crew of scavengers heads to the planet to investigate the source, hoping to score some of this lost loot along the way.
Suddenly your ship is in danger, you start to plummet from the sky. regaining consciousness, your ships AI tries to guide you through your journey of trying to dive deep enough to solve the issue of this planet.
GAMEPLAY
Discover ruins of ships while defeating enemies, use the distance markers to locate and approach the ruins.
Keep an eye on your energy bar (yellow bar) if this gets too low you will start to take damage and die. This bar is refillable at the generators located on every ship.
When you die the Energy bar does not replenish so make sure to approach a generator before going back out on your journey.
CONTROLS:
Keyboard - WASD to move - Left click to shoot - E to Use doors and collect data pads
Controller - Left stick to move - Right trigger to shoot - A to Use doors and collect data pads.

Credits:
Aaron Mairs - Programmer
Arthur Mairs - Creative Lead/3D Modeller
Oliver Grumley - 3D Modeller
Zack Grimley - Concept Artist/3D Modeller
| Link | https://wobbleblocks.itch.io/mystery-on-stalore-9 |
| (Web) | https://wobbleblocks.itch.io/mystery-on-stalore-9 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/the-mystery-of-stalore-9 |
Ratings
| Overall | 1217th | 3.342⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1248th | 3.123⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1154th | 3.045⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 686th | 3.816⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1205th | 3.404⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1097th | 2.875⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 900th | 3.5⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 69🗳️ | 91🗨️ |
Besides that, found a little bug where I left the first "ship" trying to dive to the next one I kept being teleported back into the ship I just left.
Besides that, awesome game, really enjoyed the voice over too. Congrats :smile:
I feel like the big ones should be the first enemy type as they are easy to see and shoot.
Some indicator that you are being attacked would be nice.
Death sounds of enemies are good, also the crosshair works well.
Overall it is pretty nice to play and things are working fine - detection range of enemies is quite low, so you can stand and shoot them down without being noticed by them.
What I would add: "Respawn at Checkpoint" in the Menu, Sound + Visual for losing health.
Also I played the first two levels without noticing that there is a health and energy bar, because they are not visible in the web view. Setting the CanvasScaler to "Expand" (I guess, or another setting, idk) would fix this.
Also for a jam game this is quite long. The leveldesign is really nice and the controls are tight. ^^
I found some bug in the aim system, not sure how to reproduce but happened something about 5 times, you can't move to the left without reason but after to shoot the rotation start to work again.
Despite the song I really liked the game and would like to play more time for sure, but that noise kills me :disappointed:
That said, in the end I really liked the game :heart: Keep on the great job guys! :slight_smile:
:clap: :clap: :clap:
It's a very moody games, as some postjam improvements you could add some more animations to the enemies to make them feel more alive, also a hit indicator would be cool, like shaking or color changing or something like that.
Very nicely done, congrats on your game!!
Puzzles in the game are fun and obvious enough. The only one I had problems with was to open the room with the lockdown-creating artefact. But then again - apparently you don't have to.
Graphic assets are simplistic but witting for the game.
Enemy AI is not the most sophisticated one, and often you can shoot the enemy dead before it starts reacting to you. So the game relies on hiding the enemies behind the corners to add tension. A little bit cheap, but works for a 48 hour game. :)
The music is nice. I only started getting tired of it, when I was getting tired of the game as a whole.
Which happened when I managed to beat the boss, shut down the lockdown artifact, and then nothing happened. I didn't get the notification that I need to go deeper, so I assumed I need to return to my ship to win the game... and so I did. This also didn't give me any "You win" notification, so I suppose the authors simply didn't bother to add sich a screen to the game, but while going up I got pretty annoyed at the game and particularly the "energy" mechanic.
You hardly get enough energy to travel from ship to ship using a marker. But you are also expected to fight the fish, and collect datapads along the way? Anf you only replenish the energy at the generators that are deep inside the ship. So if you had to fall back and want to try swimming again - you have to firs nafigate the whole ship to rechgarge, and then navigate back to the exit. And on my fools errand of going up I had to do this with every ship. This effectively turned the game into a slog and smeared the overall impressions of it.
But I found a bug: a spider pull me into a wall and I couldn't free myself
Other than than - great job! Good luck!
-The enemies should definitely make some noise when they move or when they attack you. A few times I died without knowing what actually hit me because I didn't see the smaller ones behind/around me.
-The hit boxes are a bit messy. Even though I was relatively far away from some enemies they still managed to land a hit. Also the boss managed to hit me through the containment door.
-That goes for the enemies as well. Most I killed with headshots but some just wouldn't die that way. I had to shoot different places untill it worked.
-At first I was a bit confused with the boss I thought I could kill him before I realized what I actually had to do. That could just be me though :D.
That said there's a lot of things you did great. The overall gameplay is great! I love the exploration. Going through abandoned underwater places fighting weird creatures is super cool and eerie. The boss battle was clever. The story elements were good. Love the audio cues when you find tablets and when new areas are unlocked. I think with a little polish this could be an amazing game and I would love to play a post LD version of it. Well done!
But I love how it's a cohesive experience as opposed to just a single "minigame"-style mechanic, that's impressive in three days.
The water didn't feel quite watery in graphics nor controls so that part felt a bit strange, and I had to go back and read the text here to get the generator and health behavior.