The Deep Madness by Sargonius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6haUmVyaQE
How to play:
- Take your rifle and harpoon.
- Kill the Summoners.
- Harpoon the supplies.
- Fuel the ship with bodies of your enemies.
- Slay the Ancient God.
- Survive.
Controls:
- WASD to move.
- Left click - Rifle
- Right click - Harpoon
Good to know:
- You can harpoon upgrade crates, don't miss them!
- You can't swim and will die in the water.
Used assets:
- We used a default Unreal Engine FirstPersonTemplate (basic input, camera, some shooting foundation)
- AI for the splash art, textures and Music (opted out from Audio)
Source code:
Though this is a Jam entry, we have a full sourcecode available in a public git repository. Feel free to check it and sorry the messy blueprints and occasional copypaste of stuff instead of a proper Interface calls... :D
Project is made with Unreal Engine 5.3.2
| GitHub | https://github.com/Sargonius/LD55 |
| Link | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ATXocMr0IvwwuQYJvnc7Qmewuz1lxm-C/view?usp=sharing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-deep-madness |
Ratings
| Overall | 772th | 3.411⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 634th | 3.395⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 971th | 2.92⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 967th | 3.123⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 817th | 2.622⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 597th | 3.536⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 86🗳️ | 156🗨️ |
But I playing at least a few times, so it was fun.
some enemies got below the raft so its kinda hard to hit them.
Overall it was pretty fun, awesome job.
Good music + clean work + Cthulhu = success! :fire:
I really like that the game has an upgrade and progression.
Art style is awesome. Mood is deep and gorgeous. Fish are very angry) very cool game. Congratulations on the completion of the jam! Good job!
I realized how much i suck at shooting things without a crosshair XD.
- It was a bit hard to understand what's going on in the beginning, e.g. can/should I try to shoot the monster that's behind me and how the refueling works.
- Not sure if being able to fall off the raft adds anything substantial, especially if it's instant death. Maybe it could just take time for you to climb back up, during which you cannot defend your raft, or something like that.
- I'm not sure how much randomness there is when it comes to generating the pickups themselves but whatever's the case, it's sometimes hard to spot them, barely a corner peeking out of the water. I feel like it's already hard enough to harpoon them while defending the raft without the additional challenge of not actually seeing them.
- This is more of an aesthetic choice, but when I think of fighting Cthulhu, I imagine it taking place at night while the full moon is shining over foggy water. This is more like just a foggy afternoon :D
- Overall enjoyable experience.
You can't shoot the monster behind you and he is mostly for cosmetic reasons at this moment. If you're too slow and don't refuel your boat - objects around you will slow down and the tentacles will get to your raft (but that's it, they don't kill you right now ;-).
Climbing back to the raft was scraped during the development, we didn't have a lot of programming hours available, sadly. I thought about teleporting player back to the raft with some damage after the fall, but it seemed weird.
Pickups are random with extra random rotation. Yeah, some of them can be barely noticeable :(
As for the light, I agree, some change of lighting during the bossfight or the overall Morning-Day-Evening-Night with bossfight cycle would be great.
Again, thank you for the feedback and for playing our game!
Nice idea and good execution. I like the progression and the feeling of becoming more powerful.
But I have some troubles with the character controller and feedbacks in general. It's hard to aim without a cursor, to know which fish is attacking and what the summoners really do (I guess they are spawning fish ?).
I love the way you explained the mechanics at the start, nice animation!
Anyway nice entry (Love Cthulu too <3)
- Graphics is very cool. It's amazing if you did it in 3 days.
- The sea move with the boat (I understand that actually all buildings around move, but we stay). So it a bit make feel that it's a fake
- It's not clear from gameplay that these flying enemies are summoners. And just once you get it - the tactics is very simple - kill summoner first and you easy win.
- I think you can make something amazing with this 3-days game. Maybe some survival roguelike.
Anyway, thank you for experience!
Yep, we did everything from scratch in 2 days, actually (the last day I had to work and we only did the tutorial and some bugfixes + testing). Some textures were ai-generated, that's why we had to opt out from graphics and I'm still quite sad because of that :D
As for the rest of your notes - you're completely correct. The water is the most basic water you can do, I wanted to speed it up with the boat, but didn't have time to try.
Tactics is very simple, yep, just kill the summoners and don't get distracted with a floating loot. The summoners are the only real danger. We tried to keep it simple and mostly went for the overall feel and mood instead of the hardcore experience :D
We're thinking about doing something with this base, the overall concept of Lovecraftian exploration-survival game seems very fun. We already have a project we're working on as an indie team, but I hope to return to this concept afterwards :)
Again, thank you for the feedback!



Interesting idea, but kinda fell flat.
I really enjoyed playing your game. Great job!!
The music was great and the final bossfight felt sufficiently badass.