Into The Abyss by Constance

Made under 72 hours by @constance, @hikiyoshi and @kamizenki a.k.a Hiyuka Studios.
DESCRIPTION
Into the Abyss is a digging-focused platformer where exploration goes straight down. Your mission: reach the bottom, uncover the truth behind the abyss, and do it as fast as you can, after all you can get a worth treasure. But be careful, watch out for those treacherous traps set by who knows anyway.
CORE GAMEPLAY
Dig Your Own Path: Break through dirt, stone, and ancient ruins with your pickaxe. You decide where to go—no set paths, no shortcuts.
Find Hidden Treasures: Scattered along the descent are lost treasure chests filled with rare materials, secrets, and boosts. Getting them isn't easy—but it’s worth it.
CONTROLS
- A, D: Move around
- W, Space: Jump
- S, Left Mouse Button: Dig at cursor position
- E: Interact
- Escape: Return to Menu
TOOLS
- Unity 6
- Visual Studio Code
- Aseprite
- Audacity
KNOWN ISSUES
Feel free to let us if there are any issues that we are not aware of yet.
CHANGELOG AND BUG FIXES
Patch #2: Bug fixes and a little polish - April 12th, 2025 - Fixed the floaty feels in player movement, improve jump input to be more responsive. - Health potions now no longer apply unwanted knock-backs. - Spikes now try to push player to either sides if player landing on top of them. - Camera now follows ahead of player if he descends faster than its move speed. - Player now can properly fit through 1-tile horizontal gaps.
Patch #1: Minor adjustments - April 8th, 2025 - Adjust volume for a couple of sound effects. - Player can now jump with both Space and W keys. - Make imperial to be the default metric type. - The injured sound effect now only plays if the player has more than 0 HP. - The digging sound effect now only plays if the player is digging a diggable tile.
INGAME CAPTURES




CONTRIBUTIONS
- @constance - Lead Programmer, Level Layout Designer, UI Designer.
- @kamizenki - Lead Artist, Game Designer, Audio Designer.
- @hikiyoshi - Mechanics Designer, Particle Effect Designer.
| Play on browser or download | https://constance012.itch.io/into-the-abyss |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/into-the-abyss-2 |
Ratings
| Overall | 463th | 3.519⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 481th | 3.321⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 589th | 3.028⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 269th | 3.953⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 407th | 3.722⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 367th | 3.385⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 622th | 2.26⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 414th | 3.604⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 53🗨️ |

Some feedback, digging at the cursor felt weird, if my mouse was off a ways away I would not dig but the animation would play. Making the gameplay mouse-less would feel better imo. Great entry and good work!

Thank you guys so much for these valuable feedback! They mean a lot to us in improving this awesome little game!
We've noted all of them down and we have to agree that some aspects still feel a bit off. But we are working on the polishing, bug fix, and quality of life patches right now, so stay tuned for that!
I found 2 small bugs that you might want to fix.
First you can jump higher than the 2 tiles you intended i manged to climp the mountain on the right side.
Second when you are full on HP and you break a box for a healing potion and the potion triggers to magnet to you, you do not collect it and get pushed around a bit-
I thought I did poorly but seeing others screenshot I'm quit happy with my score now :D 
I managed to go past the bottom. If you do it just right, you can jump over the mountains.
@prepe Haha! Good to hear that our trick of hiding chests behind decorations and environmental objects works well! It's easy to miss them if you not paying attention, but it does add up to the excitement when you manage to discover them yourself. And about those bugs you mentioned, I've noted them in the "Known Issues" section above, and I agreed that the jumping logic is still a little to be desired, and the health potions are a bit glitchy sometimes when you collect them. But I will address all of them in the next hotfix patch of the game, so stay tuned!
@bigwhiteshogun We're glad you pleased with the visuals! We poured more efforts into graphics this time compares to previous LDs, so it feels really nice to see our you guys appreciate them, just like we do. About the moon-like gravity you mentioned, we are aware that the jumping logic is still a bit off, mostly because it's our first time doing the movement logic for platformers, so it definitely needs more tweaking. But anyway, congrats for beating our game!
@transkuja Thank you! It is indeed a challenging game, but I think you'd get a hang of it pretty quick. You might feel stuck when digging horizontally because the character needs a 2-tile gap to walk through, but I admit that the digging range for diagonal tiles is a bit short, making it hard in certain situations. We'll adjust it more and perhaps adding a visual indicator to show which tile you are currently digging, we think it'd improve the overall experience.
@ranzor Thanks for playing our game! Glad you enjoyed it.
@dzugaru Thank you for the kind words! The map is done completely by hand for now, but we are planning on generating it procedurally in the future, possibly in the post-jam version because it requires a lot of time on implementation, but we believe that it'd worth efforts.
@jackofcups Thank you! We wish you luck on collecting all of them chests! A little hint is: "Pay attention on your surrounding, they might be hidden somewhere."
@letabouret We're glad you liked it! It's our first time doing tilemaps for a platformer game so it might look off in some aspects, but we'll improve them in the future.
@wheelsx Thank you! Yeah the jumping logic does get glitchy sometimes, but we might put some kind of easter eggs over the mountains there, we think they would act as rewards for some curious players.
it's quite good made. plays smooth and fun.
some tiles seems not fit together on edge, created an special feeling. picking hp potion cause player fly up a bit, not sure if it's intended.
I found the digging is a bit tricky. The pickaxe collision feels like it needs to be a bit more generous.
I think it might feel better for the character to be able to fit inside of 1 tile vertically.
Getting caught trying to move left-to-right because of the 1.5 height character felt a little off in terms of the gameplay.
It also might be nice to add a little hop that the character can do mid-air because there are so many aerial based elements that you're supposed to dodge.
It was a pretty fun experience overall.
Because the camera is constantly moving, and the character can stay in place, the player needs to follow the character with the cursor. It would be really cool to have an alternative to digging relative to the character. For example, like in The Binding of Isaac, we have WASD for walking and arrows for shooting. It would be nice to make an alternative input for digging in the form of several keys on the keyboard responsible for directional digging, or a second stick on the gamepad (if there is gamepad support, of course).
Due to physics, the character flies up a lot on corners and due to the rules of the game, I lost after breaking the box with healing, because I was on this box and after destruction I flew up due to physics.
But the game is very fun! A good entry for a jam, I would like to see the next iteration!
To be honest, I would've enjoyed the game more without the floaty physics. It was pretty frustrating when trying to pick up health potions, to the point I realized I was trying to avoid moving normally at all. Only digging and doing as little movement as possible. This was not what I wanted to experience from the game. I want to be able to move around and explore.
Nice job regardless. The music fits and the graphics seem pretty nice (could use that point filter). Points for making comprehensive settings even though I didn't experiment on them too much.

I like the pixel sprites, the stage filled with detail,and the floating particles. Will look even better after fixing some ruled tiles.Also like the intense that player have to keep going down. Nice fit in of the theme.
The feedback of digging horizontally feels a little unsatisfying comparing to digging vertically as player have to dig two blocks(as player looks one block high)to get through and have to move mouse up and down.
Jump is kind of floaty and sometimes feel weird on collision with the traps and the ⌜ ⌝ part of tile, of which I make use to get to the left and right border lol 
Great entry regardless!
Thanks for playing our game! Your feedback was very important for us in improving this game even further. We are acknowledged those issues you guys mentioned, especially the floaty-ish effect of the player's movement, or the strange behaviour of the health potions where you got push around randomly on collect.
Because of that, we were working hard recently to fully addressed those issue. And now, I'm happy to announce that the __latest patch__ is now __LIVE__ on itch.io! This patch resolves most of the aforementioned issues, plus a little polishing works to make the game feels nicer and improve the overall experience.
We were planned on doing more like adding easter eggs, a pause menu, and much more. But that was against the main rules of the jam so we'll leaving those awesome features for a __post-jam__ version after the rating period ends. So be sure to stay tuned for that as well!
Last words, I hope you enjoy the newest patch, and also, have a good day, or night, depends on where you are! Cheers!


- The music fit really good with what you are going with here
- The graphics are very good, I found some issues though:
- The tiles did not always connect the right way with each other
- It seems that tiles that do not have N, E, S or W neighbors become a corner pieces.
- I thought the crates could be interacted with too, but they're just level objects I guess
- I love how you can go from left to right all the way on top, and that the screen readjusts to the digging down part. Those are details that go unappreciated most of the time
- The overall art style is very consistent and gives a fun vibe
@skosnowich Thank you! At first the gameplay tab in the settings was empty, but when we added the depth meter we realized that why not adding an option to switch between different unit systems? As that would be helpful because there are jammers all over the globe, so we wanted everyone to be able to enjoy the game to the fullest! And for the inner corner tiles don't line up, that is because this was our first time doing tilemaps for a platformer, so there was some mistakes during the map design, but don't worry, they will be fix in the __post-jam__ version.
@byebye Thank you! I admit that health potions are a little rare sometimes, but the traps don't deal a lot of damage either, so you might not need them that many of them. But that is an important thing for us to keep in mind as well, as there will be more things that can harm the player in the future than just traps, so your feedback is noted!
@olenikimid We are happy that you liked the game! We are indeed have a lot of cool stuff planned for the __post-jam__ version, like procedural generations, enemies, upgrades, etc. So only time will tell how this little game turns out in the future! But for now, we are proud of what it already is.
@wouter52 Thank you for the detailed feedback! The crates are supposed to be breakable by the player by swinging his pickaxe at them, and they do have a chance to drop health potions too! I assume they are missing visual indicators or perhaps an instruction when you first see them. But regardless we really appreciate your honest feedback!
The graphics are great, you can see clearly your goal and the dangers. The sounds and music put me in the mood of mining and exploring the unknown.
Was it done procedimentally? or do you went on the spelunky route and build sets of levels placed randomnly?
As others have said, the music fits well, and the art is good. It did take me a while to get used to the S key digging in the direction of the mouse - it's not a problem once you get used to it, but I felt like it might have been a bit more intuitive if S always dug down? That might just be me though. Also, I liked that there's an end goal, and reason to play again, to try and get more boxes.