I loved the art style !! I'm super impressed on how "finished" the game looks, as well as the variety of sounds, the atmosphere etc.

The only thing I would have added is maybe a tooltip on buildings or something to make it clearer what they do ? Because it is sometimes hard to guess.

Also, directional arrows don't seem to work for me so I cannot pan the camera around. WASD doesn't work either.

In any case, superb job !!

@fdk Thanks! Weird about the arrow keys. Did you play the embedded HTML5 version of the game? If the issue is there, maybe try the download instead. And yeah, extra pointers, tutorials and labels on actions would do the game a lot of good for sure, that would be the next thing Id focus on if I had more time.

@frankiemileshow, yes it was on the HTML5 Version ! I'll try the Desktop version when I'm back on Windows, cheers !

@fdk Looked it up, it seems like this is a new issue with Game Maker exports to html5, the game loses keyboard access if you ever click outside the play window, and doesnt get it back by just clicking back in. But it seems like it restores keyboard access if you toggle full screen mode, or sometimes if you hit TAB to return to it. I added a note under the game about this, thanks!

Amazing job. I don't know how you had time to make something like this only in 48 hours, but I respect that!

@jani-nykanen I streamed the whole thing on twitch! On the final day I was starting to think Id need to extend this into a jam game, because it didn't feel like a "game" yet. It didn't have enough content, the map was still mostly empty, it felt more like just a "toy" sandbox - but I pulled it through in the last 6 hours by finishing up some of the building restrictions, shrinking the map dimensions to make it easier to fill up and adding more monster types around the map for variety. In the end it only has like half the buildings I was planning at first, but what's there is solid enough to work on its own.

fun game! expanded my lab to the entire map and defeated the boss. built a lot more buildings after that just for fun. The tips on the itch.io page were very helpful. Pixel art is lovely and the sound atmosphere is great as well. A weekend well spent I'd say!

Brilliant stuff. I'm really very impressed with the level of polish you managed to pull off for a compo, I felt like it was right up to the wire. Do you plan on continuing development?

really great game! i love your art style, its amazing. nice job!

Awesome entry, extremely polished. Very impressed that you managed to pull all this off in the compo! Really fun too, I found myself playing for much longer than I planned to. Phenomenal sprites as well, hard to believe it was all done by you!

Only issue is that I couldn't get the arrow keys to work so I was limited to the base screen size unfortunately. Still definitely one of my favorite entries regardless. Phenomenal work!

@thx Thanks for playing! Unfortunately there is a recent Game Maker HTML5 bug where a game loses keyboard access as soon as the form loses focus, and its hard to get it back. One thing that seems to work is to toggle full screen mode using the button at the bottom right, it should give you back the arrow key controls.

I'm terrible at these kinds of games but this one is really polished for a jam. well done

Game's a killer - loved it


got killed by the big boss the 1st time around - the one up north
put rows upon rows of turrets the 2nd time around - made it till the end

I videoed a preview of my endgame-settlement
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nH6nkAzkAKPQsU9dTAanaCKiV6SVa2Mi/view?usp=sharing
[couldn't convert to gif - too heavy - sorry]

It's a shame the game lacks a self-contained tutorial
what you write on your itch page is really helpful to get started in the game
it's really pleasant to like build an underwater little settlement
the building algo works super well - really impressive in 72h only great job there :-O

I hope U get far in the top 100 - fantastic game - played it for a solid 45 mins - sound design is funny af and there's that weird noice at the back - the ever-ascending note - it's trippy af - really well put-together

Thanks for the esperience - I loved it - take care - can't wait to see what you'll cook up for the LD49 in October :-D

So I really like your game and I'm streaming Ludum Dare 48 games on saturday with my friend Teauorent on his Twitch channel - https://www.twitch.tv/teauorent - Saturday May 1st 4PM CET
First of all - that cool with you? This may redirect some traffic to your page for more people to try your LD48 game :smile:
If you'd like, please e-mails us anecdotes and sneak peeks of your creative process (photos, screenshots, beta/WIP asset renders, mood boards, concept Art, etc.) so we can present them alongside and illustrate your LD48 adventure to our audience :slight_smile:
Here's our e-mail to send all that good stuff to --> TeamChooChoo.GameJams@gmail.com [we will confirm receiving your e-mail(s) upon reception]
The show will be in french but I'm bilingual so you can totally submit in english, we'll take care of the rest :slight_smile:

Have a great day, I hope to hear from you soon - thanks for that great moment I spent testing your little nugget of a game, and see you in the chat on saturday I hope :heart:

The game is stellar, especially for a Compo entry. I'm astonished by how polished and commercial-like this game looks and plays! Art, sound FX, gameplay, everything is flawless. The way you mixed exploration with the feeling of "building" something is masterful and got me hooked from the start. Please keep working on this.

This game is incredible, easily 5 stars on everything. The art is really neat, you managed to convey so much detail with very few pixels. The sounds put you into the right mood immediately too.
The gameplay has a lot of depth to it.
Placing sonar towers just to find a horde of mobs running towards you is scary, panic building turrets and hearing them defend the base is great.

I can't believe you made this within 48h.

Wow, I could see myself easily spending hours trying to build the optimal base! It does take a minutes to understand what everything does, but once I got that down it was tons of fun. Outstanding stuff!

This was amazing! Great atmosphere and art, and I liked that the pacing was based on my lab expanding and not time; I was afraid that I'd suddenly get attacked by some huge enemy force that I couldn't handle because I didn't optimize enough.

Dune underwater! Really nice city builder :). There were some unfinished elements that i didn't know how to use, but overall very enjoyable experiance! (btw. the lazer tower didn't hit anything :( )

Awesome compo entry! I conquered the entire map. The spooky boss was awesome!

Suggestions:
- I don't know what each building do. This confuses me a lot in the beginning. Descripts would help me a lot
- When I click to "salvage" the building, frenquently I click and salvage the wrong contruction. This is very annonying! Some highlight or just the name of selected building should help.
- Something like "Mission complete" when I defeat major/all enemies.
- The turrets sometimes missed they target. More highlights/description for the player understand better the shooting area should be nice.

One time, I clicked on a building right after it was destroyed and the game throws an error and closes (I'm playing the standalone version).

Love it! This is the first Ludum Dare game I've ever actually come back to later because I wanted to play more. There are a couple overall user experience improvements I could suggest though:

- The amount of buildings available from the getgo is overwhelming, and there's not a good way ingame to figure out what they all do, so maybe unlocking them gradually would flow better.
- Specific color squares for placing buildings that need to go in a specific place (ie ore tiles) would be helpful , as I had a difficult time at the beginning trying to work out where the ore tiles were.

Loved the megaboss as well, I pushed north and was disappointed, assuming it was just one of the larger crabs, and then was suddenly very surprised haha. Well done!

Killer art, as always! It's neat that you took the time to do 8 unique sprites for the turrets, I appreciate it! The seaweed sway, the way the radar dishes scan around, the shaking tops on the drills, it's very good. And the way bubbles of different sizes all bounce around as they rise, very cool. not to mention the enemy animations :thumbsup: good stuff!

The art in this is fantastic and really impressed at what you were able to do in such a short time. The game felt really polished and liked the amount of variety there was with the building. Would have been nice to have seen some descriptions for all the objects so you'd have more of an idea what each one did but after a few playthroughs I got the hang of it. Impressed at how much fun it was managing all the resources, building and attacks. Great game :)

-Fun: (5)
I had immense fun with this game - the non LD points might explain it better.

-Innovation: (4)
It has some vibes of tower assault, where the players faction has all the non mobile units, who is expanding into the creatures of the deeps territory, who has all the mobile units.

-Theme: (4.5)
Going deeper and deeper into hostile territory as a tower offense.

-Grafics: (5)
Maybe there could be more info & highlighting in your game, but there is so much already in it.

-Audio: (4)
Ambient sfx, fighting & construction are neat - a soundtrack might be to much to ask.

-Humor: (3)
Here and there I see a reference.

-Mood: (4.5)
The blue & red colorscheme & the ambient sound add the most to the deepsea feeling.

-Overall: ( 5 + 4 + 4.5 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 4.5 -> 4.5 )
The game isn't perfect, but it managed to pull off so many & so well - it is great.

The Points I would like to rate:

-Quality/Polish: (4.5)
There could be some kind of menu, but that is nitpicking.

-Genre: (4.5)
Imho some mobile units for the player & some structures for enemies (like nest etc.) would make it to a classy RTS, at the expense of innovation.

-Szenario: (4.5)
The game has not a goal, it is clear you need to build up, from there all your small goals are created and therefore create a fun to play mission.

-Setting: (5)
Abyssal Lab got a welldone deep under the sea vibe, supported by it's artstyle, colorscheme, sound, how the deepsea denizen looks...

-Story(telling): (3)
The game don't tell you what is going on on it's own, though there are some hints of lore...

-Controls: (5)
Scrolling, construction placement, GUI, HUD(info like resources) ... a there is a lot and almost always I managed to click the correct building, except rarely some of the corridors.

-Complexity: (5)
Multiple Resources, parts of the economy are multilayerd, defense towers, a couple of enemy types ... are you insane?

-Rules: (5)
From economy over expansion over combat over exploring, there is nothing I could complain much about it.

-Difficulty: (4)
Sometimes a situation gets a bit out of control, but the game has a tendency to be a bit easy.
It would be dope if there would be sometimes enemies that attack your base actively like waves of an invasion like event.

-Content: (5)
I wish you would have done this as a jam and there would just be more, smth like different maps or so

This was amazing- loved the immersion with all the underwater sounds and the terror or trying to build out with huge health bars lurking in the darkness of the fog of war. Would be awesome to see more post-compo. On par for a win with this one! The only downside was a lack of some music.

The most disappointing thing about this game is the fact that there's no actual "end" to it. Solid aesthetics, actually engaging gameplay loop, audio was a bit minimal, but it _worked_, and the uh... "creatures" were sufficiently terrifying.

Ending aside, the two biggest issues I have with it are 1) using the arrow keys + mouse (no WASD?) and 2) what to do is a bit unclear. Would have really helped if the buildings had tooltips that explained what they did, but I figured it out well enough eventually.

Really impressive it's a compo game and not a jam game, so I can't knock it too much.

Really cool entry. The art style was great and, once you understand what you're doing, it was fairly easy to play. My biggest complaints are that figuring out what to do wasn't very intuitive (needing cranes to build some structures and not others, no explanation on what buildings do, etc.) and that there doesn't seem to be a goal. I assume there isn't an "ending" or I missed it. I explored almost all of the map, except a few squares, and killed everything I think but there was only a big enemy that I assume was the boss. Anyway, the game was pretty fun and the Lovecraftian monsters were cool enemies.

Seriously fun game. Needs a bit more explanation on what goes where, but figured it out in the end :smile_cat: love the graphical style! Well done!