Spelunking Simulator Pro 2022 by roryh
Short little hover physics platformer where you control a survey drone investigating a cave.
Controls: Player: wasd/arrow keys/dpad (game controller) to move. Moving up will jump, moving down will temporarily stop hovering. esc to quit. Menu: wasd/arrow keys/dpad to navigate. z/enter to select a menu option.
The hover physics are a bit unusual. The goal was to allow very precise horizontal movement, with an emphasis on clinging to walls and ceilings for positioning. The physics is not very difficult to master but I think it turned out kinda neat.
Map editor controls: Middle click to toggle between playing and not playing. When not in playing mode, up/down to toggle between editor modes (editing, map select, playing). In editing mode: left/right/a/d to cycle between selections. Mouse to move cursor, and z to change brush selection to match what cursor is hovering over. In map select mode: left/right to toggle between maps. In playing mode: play normally. Middle click to return to editing mode. The map editor automatically saves any changes made. Note that if you've changed to a built-in level, you will end up permanently editing it. To restore built-in maps, redownload/re-extract the game and replace the affected .world files in apps/ld48/data/ with the ones from the fresh copy of the game.
Credit: Aseprite used for making the "art". Music procedurally generated using Abundant Music (https://pernyblom.github.io/abundant-music/index.html) and recorded with airfont 380 sound font. Custom Lua/C game engine j25, uses SDL2, zlib, libpng, libglew, luajit.




Ratings
| Given | 4🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
Pretty interesting take on a hardcore platformer. It was nice to have a new challenge.
Rad job with with the engine. :> Also, nice work with the different areas. The graphics and music really adds to the atmosphere, feeling like a drone in those places. (The sound-font/music works very well towards that too btw.)
Tbh the physics felt a tad too slippery for me and took a while to grasp, and I felt that hitboxes on spikes could be more forgiving (Empty space in drone's lower-right corner can collide with empty space on right-wall spike's top-left corner).
Aside from that, the game feels pretty cohesive and polished. Definitely one of your better solo submissions and looking forward to more. ;) Nicely done.
It's nice to see a precision platformer, especially in a game jam, with a really fleshed out. The graphics look simple but great, and fit very well. Hitboxes were unforgiving, which isn't what you want in a game such as this.
This is definitely a great entry in the jam, and im glad you made this. Top marks.
I'm being very picky here but it feels like the hit box on the guy is a little too big, i.e. I die sometimes when I haven't quite hit a spike.
Great job overall and keep up the good work!
The slow acceleration and inertia does make the controls feel a little unresponsive.
I like the graphics/sound/music!
This is as far as I got:

It feels really polished and plays really. The levels are really well done : not too obvious and not too frustrating if you get into a groove. The "lava" zone is maybe the most frustating, it's where I started to feel I didn't have enough control over the drill.
Overall it's a really solid game. Congratulations on such a nice entry !
I enjoy a good challenge though!