Shovel is just Love Spelled Backwards by very dark lord
Love can be found in the most unlikely places
This is the story of Diana the Digger. A red-headed self-confident girl with a special liking of genuinely bad boys.
This time you might say, she's gone too far. Or... too deep, that is... because she figured that the ultimate scoundrel, the villain of villains does indeed not dwell the earth but must be looked for... elsewhere.
Off she goes. She's got the nerve and she ain't afraid of the dark. Equipped with her shovel and armed with the faith of the amorous she drives out of town and into the wild and starts to dig into the earth.
Gameplay & Controls
Control Diana the Digger with your WASD keys, Space to jump. Press F to let her dig
deeper. You can control the digging direction by pressing any of the
direction keys while digging.
As a bonus we couldn't properly integrate into the game, but you may still use:
- E lets you throw bombs (up to 10 per level), but be careful not to hurt yourself
- J activates the jackhammer
Technology
The Game has been completely written from scratch using Typescript and HTML. It uses it's own self-made 2D physics engine, features unique hand-drawn pixel art, witty dialogues and an unexpected endgame with a twist.
Sounds from freesfx.co.uk
Music from freemusicarchive.org
Screenshots
Bugfixes
04-27: - Some typos in menus/dialogues - Finishing the story didn't unlock the bonus levels - Removed a debug alert we forgot in the code - Removed a bug causing extreme slow-downs in scenes with text-rendering
04-28: - Fixed game breaking bug that caused Firefox users with screen color profiles to not be able to finish the game - Fixed seizure-inducing flickering light issues - Fixed issue with player getting stuck in falling sand particles
05-04: - Fixed the pixel-per-meter constant which caused player character to be 2.5m tall from physics perspective, as well as two minor jumping related glitches
05-11: - Slight adjustments to level 4 and 5 where players reported getting stuck a lot
| Link | https://deeper-and-deeper.pages.dev |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/shovel-is-just-love-spelled-backwards |
Ratings
| Overall | 244th | 3.95⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 517th | 3.619⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 613th | 3.475⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 224th | 4.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 962th | 3.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 365th | 3.45⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 562th | 3.75⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
@labete might I ask which browser you've been playing this in? Car monologue looks fine to me, but the rendering may differ depending on environment. Thanks for playing!
Solid entry overall, good job!
At some points I can guess what's being said, but it's still hard to read.
The controls were a bit cumberson to switch from f to enter etc. woiuld be good if you could point with a mouse where to dig as it never dug in the area that i mainly expected, that coupled with the slow animations made it a bit tedious at time.
Music and SFX were not balanced well and lots of noise.
Animates are good but slow moving, the load screen between levels for example, felt a bit frustrating.
The level design was great. Loved the puzzles of it and how the water interacted with for example.
Maybe make an indicator that you are having a status issue like drowning.
(I wasn't able to reach the end yet.)
@vixenmink indeed, for the postjam version we're considering having a healthbar, or some other way to indicate when drowning happens. Right now that's pretty intransparent and surprising when it happens I guess. :D
@collin-visser I slightly adjusted the level to make that part easier. In case you're still up for playing the rest, the game should still know which levels you had unlocked, given you're playing in the same browser. It's possible though that there are issues with loading the level that make them impossible - we haven't seen these in a while, but I can't rule out that it may be happening for some players. Hope that's not the case, either way, sorry for the frustration!
The green water is actually acid, and it even reacts nicely with other substances. Sadly we had such little time for level design towards the end of the jam that we weren't able to demonstrate that, despite how cool it is. :( So in the end the acid is pretty pointless in the game's jam state sadly. Will be much more prominently featured in the postjam version.
@goldone Thanks a lot! To be honest, the slow pace wasn't fully intentional. Rather the crunch time was so intense that we didn't manage to tweak such obvious things as there was just too much super essential stuff to get done within very short time. In the end it would just have been changing two variables in the code, but we couldn't be sure the levels would still work with those adjustments. Really sad as that's the major point of criticism, but we'll learn from it and hopefully do better in future jams. :)
+ the destructible surroundings and especially the particle/fluid physics were remarkable and definitely a surprise for a 72h game
- except the occasional lava flowing upwards, it worked pretty damn well
+ nice intro and cutscenes. The initial car scene with the guitar soundtrack reminded me somewhat of borderlands
+ the music was very nice, but didn't fit so well to the slow digging. A little tweaking here would have had a big impact
+ I really dug the art style!
+ Had a good laugh at the ending
Great entry!