Dwarven Depths by steelax
Dwarven Depths is a First Person Puzzler / Escape Room. Inspired by Portal for mechanics (minus the portals) and Skyrim and Warcraft for the Theme.

You must travel through an ancient Dwarven Kingdom Guided by the voice of a Lost Soul. 'The Great Cataclysm' has led to many Dwarven Souls being Trapped and you have been recruited to help free them.

This is only the First 2 levels of what was a larger game in planning. But to keep within the scope i had to cut a lot of the levels.

I live streamed the entire process on twitch and even had 8 viewers at one point!
Hope You enjoy.
Dwarven Depths is my first Submission to a Game jam that was done Solo. I used premade assets, but all the Code and the Level Design etc was done by me. I have opted out of Audio and Graphics as stated in the rules,
I hope you enjoy it and give it your prescious time. This was a labor of love and a huge learning oppertunity and i Loved Every Minute!
Engine: Unity
Credits: Assets used:
Synty Studios Dungeon Realms Synty Studios Dungeons Synty Particle FX Felfurion - padlock and key AI Voices by: Speechelo
SoundEffects :
Ancient Game Sound Effects Home and Office SFX Pack Lite Online Scary Voice Changer Audacity for some slight edits to Voices and Effects
Links on the Itch Page
Thanks Steelax SteelGemGames
| WebGL and Windows Download Available | https://steelgemgames.itch.io/dwarven |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/dwarven-depths |
Ratings
| Overall | 771th | 3.598⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 930th | 3.336⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1380th | 2.864⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1363th | 3.268⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 936th | 2.64⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 432th | 3.868⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 81🗨️ |
Also really love the voice acting, it adds a lot to the game!
One thing that came to mind is that the hammer animation could possibly use a bit of impact to it by making the swing a bit wider and not as even and the movement speed felt a tiny bit off.
Overall a really great entry! :D
Finally, the inertia in the controls took a bit of getting used to, but it was fine after a while.
I loved the game and wanted more levels. Good job and good entry
I had a few small issues that could individually be addressed pretty quickly im sure:
- during intro dialogue, i fell off the platform by peeking down the ladder, it turns out the outer section doesnt have a collider, and was treated with a repeat of the speech (oof)
- mouse sensitivity is quite low
- I had a hard time noticing the key, and an even harder time figuring out how to get the box open with it. I'm still not quite sure what I did differently but that should be looked at for sure. if its a key touches box thing, then maybe a small table for the box would be a simple fix.
- on getting in the main chamber, after being told I wouldnt be able to jump up, I was mysteriously able to just jump straight up (more swim really) the area where the stairs were meant to have been, not sure how I was meant to get up there but I feel that wasn't it.
When moving the mouse over a certain direction (I first noticed this in the throne room), the mouse becomes a bit jittery and moves faster than it does facing any other direction. I believe this is when I was at the edge of the room (or in one of the side rooms) and looking toward the center. My team and I had this issue in one of our games, from what I remember it was something with the textures being too detailed, so it kind of became laggy/jittery when facing those textures. I'm not sure what you can do with bought assets, but if it's possible to dumb them down in some way to prevent that, that would be great. I'm sure you'd have to experiment around with some stuff.
The narrator also told me that I couldn't jump the gap in the stairs and that I'd need to find another way up. I'm not entirely sure what I did but I was able to double/triple jump and make it up there. I did find the proper solution on a second playthrough though.
Some of the subtitles were slightly out of view of my screen when I wasn't in full screen, and I had a little bit of trouble understanding the narrator at times, but I thought her voice overall was perfect.
I did really enjoy the game though and would love to see what comes of it!
Additionally the throne room got quite laggy due to particles.
And, just a little nitpick... But in the jewel area it feels kinda weird to have the voice outright tell you the answer to the riddle after a placing down the first gem right.
All things considered, it was a very fun experience nontheless, and smashing wood with a hammer is always fun!
Congrats on your very first LD entry, hope we see you again!
Overall a great game and good voicing acting!
@j0ye you should have seen my original plan it had 10 levels! From all the youtube vids about jams i have watched, overscoping is always an issue early days of joining jams :P.
It is frustrating that some of these bugs i could fix in 2 minutes but didn't give myself enough time to test it thuroughly. i think i might recruit a friend to be my tester next time.
As for the stair mechanic. that was an 11th hour change that broke that. the real way to do it involved a column. Thats all i will say.
Once again thanks for all the feedback, positive and negative means a lot.
I like the puzzle design and would love to see where you would be able to take this.
About the menu: you were using the default unity sprites, which don't have the greatest reputation. It only takes like 5 seconds to replace the sprite with none and make it look better (or you could even make your own). Also the quit button doesn't quit on webGL. It quits the player, which confuses the browser. Normally people don't want to quit, but just to close the page.
Another thing: voice acting. It kept me accompany during gameplay, but it isn't good. I understand text to speech, but it's one of the most overused voices in the whole internet. I too used text to speech and many people didn't even believe me. I used [Microsoft Guy Online on this website](http://onlinetonegenerator.com/voice-generator.html) which isn't the best, but it's fine. You could search for other websites and other voices, but those ones weren't that good. The ending sounded good, when the voice was more deep all of a sudden.
At first I was stuck, as I couldn't open the chest. I guess you have to stand on it? It's very confusing. It would be better to just have it under E. When I hold something and press E on nothing it plays a sound that seems very out of place. Another thing was that I didn't see the levers. The easiest solution would have probably been to color them differently. Also I was able to pick up the green and red gem at the same time and they clipped through each other, so I guess that's not an intended mechanic.
For the graphics: good selection. I wouldn't say job, as you didn't make them (since there is no graphics category in rating). But they looked rather nice. Nothing seemed out of place , which was surprising. Only issue was with lightning. Some objects shine light when I hold them. Well the lightning didn't want to follow me all of the time.
Performance: not great. I have a good computer and I understand that WebGL isn't the most performant, but it wasn't great. That and the fact that mouse sensitivity was very high (happens on WebGL, the window is low res) didn't make it appealing. Would prefer a windows version :/
Overall: Good job. If this is your first game I'm excited about your future. Mine first jam game wasn't as good as this one. Not even close. I hope you can manage your own code and not have a mess that will bite you later. Another thing: don't make this a full release. If you are beginning you will never finish the full release. And if you do it won't be that good. Try to improve and when your projects will be stable, do something bigger. Good job