Highly Successful Research Submarine by James Macgill
Earn your fortune by diving to the deepest depth of the ocean photographing wonderful creatures.
How to play: (Read the editor guide at least or your first build will be frustrating)
Build Editor - keyboard only [WASD][E Select][ESC/R Cancel][Q Rotate]
Your first sub requires engine, battery, quarters, a helm and a camera station.
You can't afford anything else at first (even corridors) so you have to be compact.
NOTE: Doors are required between rooms and are place automatically if there is open space on both sides
Sub: [WASD] [E - pickup] [R - use/leave station]
Use[R] the dive control to the left of the helm to start and stop dives and the surface button to the right of the helm ([R]twice) to come back up. Use[R] the camera station to take pictures, but keep an eye on the state of your ships equipment as it may break down. Different parts need different tools to repair them. And if they catch fire you will have to put the fire out before you can repair them further.
- Build a submarine. More powerful submarines can dive down to deeper levels!
- 21 wonderful sea creatures to discover. The deeper you go, the more exotic they get.
- Photos of more exotic creatures are worth more money.
- Wait for the perfect shot! Clearer photos are worth more money.
- But don't wait too long! The deeper you are, the more pressure it is on your scrappy submarine, and the more repairs you'll have to do!
Features:
- Build a submarine!
- Photograph underwater creatures.
- 14 dive locations to explore
- Don't forget to keep your submarine in working condition!
UI and diving glitches were fixed post-Jam.
Join our discord server to provide feedback and access to new builds as we continue to develop the game:
Ratings
| Overall | 973th | 3.483⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1144th | 3.198⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 238th | 3.884⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 450th | 3.974⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 886th | 3.707⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1232th | 2.417⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 564th | 3.122⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1076th | 3.368⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 76🗳️ | 95🗨️ |
Maybe also a little descriptions of how keys work.
But, nice concept, you could try to make it a post jam version! :D
The graphics are very nice, the audio is very minimal but builds a nice atmosphere. Controls were fine but sometimes when I pressed R I accessed a station in another room on accident and sometimes picking up the correct tool when multiple were in the same spot was difficult. Nothing super broken though.
Other than that, this is a really relaxed game where you just snap photographs of fish and sell them while building a submarine. Very nice.
While surfacing it was fully on fire and everything was broken. That's my style of doing things!
I had a lot of fun, there are of course things that could be tweaked, but I think the other comments give already a good overview about those. I'll definitely keep this game and maybe we'll even see a save system some day? :) Well done guys!
Blocky graphics are simple but nice and consistent. Text in the intro is way too big - the font size just assaults ;).
What I personally would change is the frequency with which stuff breaks and needs fixing. It often felt like there was just no time to wait for any good shot because this and this thing broke again and a yellow warning is flashing. It started to feel quite tedious.
It would also be nice if we could just pick up and reposition elements of our submarines, instead of having to sell them and re-buy them. Would also be nice, I think, if a window was just something you could attach to a wall of any room and not necessarily a separate room - this way you could design the outside of your ship as well as the inside :)
I also had a bug, I think. The only audio that played for me was in the menu (the button sounds). Otherwise, I had no audio. No music, no sfx. Is there any fix for this or a possible cause? I was playing in headphones.
Overall, it's a really impressive amount of content and effort for a jam game! And it definitely has a potential to grow.
The damage can be annoying - but you can get away with ignoring it for longer than you might think. Balancing the damage is hard especially with rnd and depth being combined as they currently are.
One minor technical thing first: Cancel button could be different in WebGL version as the ESC quits the full-screen mode.
Don't know how to make all the rooms reachable when constructing the submarine. Tried various combinations, turning stuff around. I don't have enough cash for the corridors that could perhaps remedy this? Maybe there should be a check when the player rotates the room if it's reachable in its current place so less trial and error would be needed. The room could be highlighted green if so, red if not.
To onboard the player without too much frustration, it would be recommended to have available only the rooms that are essential for the submarine at first. Then add more parts later on the catalog when the player has the money for them. The initial parts could act as a tutorial when constructing the submarine.
Shame I couldn't get any longer with the game. It has a nice bit of humor going on and constructing the submarine seems an interesting take on the jam theme.
The editor is indeed a little fiddly :( I've added the list of essential first rooms to the how to play section on the site and an image to help people figure out the door placement. Rooms often have to be rotated to make them work with each other.
Update - cancel key is now 'R' in the editor so it will not kick you out of fullscreen.
And yes, we are sad we missed on integrating the audio - will absolutely be adding it post jam.
Lots of balancing to do post jam.
I agree with people above about needing some more money so we can express our creativity directly at the start (even tho not having too much is kinda motivating for playing more). I also thing it could be great if you can have some kind of indicator of the value of what you have on your camera **while** you are taking photo, so you have directly the "sparkle of joy" when you see big catches on your camera, instead of having to go check on your mission status their value.
But anyway, solid entry, great job to reaching this degree of completion with a 3D game, I really liked your little game o/ Big bravo to you guys !
Really spent some time in this game, it's kinda addicting haha. Loved it!
The idea is amazing - the mechanic of taking pictures, combined with survival mechanics...incredible! I missed the soundtrack, and at least for me, the game has no sound at all. that's a little sad.
Despite that, i played and enjoyed every minute. I liked very much and i will waiting ansiously for an update. I wonder how that game would be if you had more time to do it. Great work!
Thank you so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007852839?t=3h22m31s
While the tutorial is nice to bring some of the backstory, there could be a bit more info on what you have to do (e.g. which parts you need etc)
The key bindings are a bit unintuitive, e.g. rotating with R would make a lot more sense to me
Expect building to be much improved post jam!
Even though I like building games, I think it would have been nice to start with a simple example build (maybe intentionally imperfect)
I would recommend changing the key bindings (Q = rotate left, E= rotate right, space = action), besides that nothing else to comment.
You can find the timestamp of when your game was played here: https://tinyurl.com/LDJAM48-ursa
Most other comments have already talk about what could have been done also to perhaps make the game even better, so I will not repeat that here.
Congrats on an unique and excellent game!
Edit: Also it would be helpful to have an indicator of which items are absolutely necessary for diving when building the sub, maybe like a checklist.
some optimization for control and UI might be favored. The tools might be hard to pick when dropped together, and sometimes they are hard to find when blending with the environment.
This was a ridiculously ambitious project! I really like how it all came together. I got weirdly excited whenever I saw a new fish, and I love that rather than just being models projected onto a 2D screen, they could actually be closer and further away from the camera.
Really excellent work here!
Other than the bugs and unfinished stuff, some suggestions I'd give would be to speed up the early game. I spent a lot of time trying to get enough money for my first room. After I unlocked the second area, it went far faster.
I noticed also that there were at least 3 different games going on at once here. One was a base builder, another was a camera game, and another was an overcooked-like. This is a cool thing, and it's impressive you got it all done in time, but in the future you might want to trim down the number of systems you want to implement so that you have one core gameloop you focus on. It will help you make a more polished experience for your next jam!
Hope something in there helps :D
Because of those technical difficulties we had on stream, yours is the very first game we played in this stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1017517813
Congrats guys!
The art looks good and the idea of playing Pokémon Snap in a sub is clever.
We hear you on the difficulty of getting good photos, especially on the the first level where you can only go down to 500m (It gets much easier on deeper levels, but it does not help if you can't afford to go on the deeper levels!) If you do want to play a more developed version you can [join our discord](https://discord.gg/aeQnUAE74W).