Earth Diver by BarelyEvenGames
Made for Ludum Dare Compo in 48 Hours. All art, music, code, game design, and sound effects were created for the jam with 48 hour time period.
Tools used:
Engine - Gamemaker Studio 2.3
Music - Mixcraft 9
SFX - sfxr.me
Art - GMS2 sprite editor
Palette - Cyclope6 by Royal_Naym (from Lospec.com)
Dive deep into the earth and upgrade your ship as you get the highest score you can in this endless runner!
Ratings
| Overall | 438th | 3.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 331th | 3.5⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 782th | 2.568⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 650th | 3.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 404th | 3.5⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 198th | 3.614⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 399th | 3.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
- a really enjoyable runner/shooter
- great graphics
- great sound
- fun to replay
Improvements:
- a scoreboard that keeps track of your best scores(highest score, highest phase) so you can compete with yourself
- perhaps some powerups to modify the experience occassionally
Bugs:
- not really a bug; but a game that encourages you to be at the far top of the screen results in a lot of deaths because you clicked in the browser address bar |D

Good Game.
Curious, did you manually map the collision bounds on the thinner hallway sections?
Loved the music, tron vibes, it was a great addition to a shmup, its always so difficult to balance sound/software/art/design in the tight time schedule.
At first I played on my laptop and trackpad, so it would have been nice to have an alternate fire button, I get that this is far from the ideal way to play one of these fast paced precision movers, so tried on the big rig with the mouse, which obviously worked much better.
Overall well done, cohesive, playable, enjoyable.
Really fun game, looks simple but clean, music is nice. Great job!
@bw-devel wow, thanks for the detailed feedback! You’re totally right, I should have added some upgrades and a high score save. It honestly wasn’t even me running out of time, I just got really lazy at the end and figured it was good enough lol and the bug you mentioned is something I hadn’t even considered, but I did notice that being a problem when I’m up high. I’ll have to look into a good way to fix that.
@generalsturgeon thanks! Honestly the music was the first thing I made and then I designed the whole game around it, so that means a lot :) and yeah, the bullets are really annoying, I’ll have to fix that for my next game.
@pxldev i appreciate the feedback! I was hoping the controls were basic enough that I could leave that off of the screen, so its good to hear i still need to consider it. thanks!
@max-xd thanks! That means a lot :)
@acuriosity thank you! This was some great feedback as I honestly hadn’t considered track pad users. I’ll have to make sure that’s an option in future games. For the little maze sections where you have to follow the path, I physically drew out a bunch of designs and the game just chose from one of I think 4 options. Gms2 has a setting for the collision mask where you can make it precise per frame, so I used that for the collision masks and it did all of that for me.
@reheated thank you! I was going for a tense vibe, so glad that it worked :)
@bauke-regnerus thanks! The explosion took awhile so I’m glad it worked for you.
@shaunjs thank you! It was great being on your stream!
Nice game overall, loved the graphics and the music/sound effets. As was said before a high score counter would have been a nice touch but that's about it. The game feels nice, polished, and you managed to make me wanna play it again & again to improve my score. Good job ! :smile:
✔️ Very intuitive gameplay, no tutorial needed!
➖ I would have maybe made the stars a different colour to communicate they weren't obstacles.
Well done!