Undercity by Monado

Plot
After years of destroying the surface of the earth, humanity had moved to build toward the heavens.
The surface was left behind, the hubris of what was once man now lay in ruin below. A new surface was built far above the old one, held up with immensely large structures called "Roots".
Not everyone followed up to the new surface. Some who defied stayed underneath the new surface.
That is the undercity.
Yuna is one of the Special Recon Force members of the Surface Coalition. A week or so ago, a dear friend of Yuna fell into an old Root elevator. Presumed safe, she was trapped in the undercity.
Yuna, now prepared to rescue her partner, has begun to descend the old Root elevator, into the undercity.
Summary
Undercity is an exploration/action platformer where you play the role of Yuna as she searches the Undercity for her partner, of whom, accidentally found their way into the Undercity. Talk to locals to find out where she might be, and fend off hostiles with an array of weapons as Yuna continues her search.

Controls
- Move: WASD
- Shoot: Left Click/E
- Reload: R
- Run: Left Shift
- Jump: Space
- Pause: Escape
- Inventory: I
- Quick Inventory: T
- Climb: W
Credits
Game Created by Monado-神 (@monado17)
Music:
Cyber Noir - Eric Matyas, soundimage.org
| itch.io windows download | https://monadokami.itch.io/ld57 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/undercity |
Ratings
| Given | 4🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
The audio issues got annoying at parts. As cool as it is that enemies persist between rooms, hearing three robots shooting off screen was annoying. I had to make sure I killed the respawning robots every time I went back through a room just to keep my sanity. Some other minor glitches include enemies and dropped items clipping, and a new room not loading correctly until I respawned.
Still, this did feel like a sizeable game that was not bloated or padded. A solid platforming action game. I felt rewarded when I read the item descriptions and saw how I could make those extra jumps to get even cooler weapons! Great work!
- Glitch with footsteps that accumulate (maybe when changing level?)
- you can somehow talk to someone else when in dialog, which freezes the first dialog box and it can't close
- Give the option to make the sprint a toggle instead of a hold
- Walljumping shouldn't require the sprint to gain height on the same wall, it just makes it slightly but needlessly harder (take mario's walljump for exemple)
- You can get softlocked if you talk to an NPC while in the air after jumping (specifically the one that drops on you)
- Enemies don't stop shooting immediatly when they die, they just rotate and float around
- Running when carrying the shotguns breaks the animation
- You can't unequip items from your inventory as equiping one moves it out and you can't select it anymore, which means you're stuck unable to go back to melee (unless I misunderstood how the unequip works but I don't think so)
- Not being able to aim your gun forces you to be in front of the enemy all the time, which makes fighting some of them (like that robot that shoots directly at you) annoying. And judging by the message on one of the weapons, which states that not being able to aim is specific to it, I am guessing you could aim before and it got broken ?
- The enemies don't have weapons but still shoot you, so you get surprised
- The shooting robots dont lose track of you when you change levels, so they keep shooting and you can always hear them non stop
- Enemies should have 3 times less health easily, it will make the game simpler but more importantly smoother
There might be more but I had already restarted the game 4 times and the robot sound was drilling my ears so I decided to stop before the red keycard's door :sweat_smile:
Some aspects of the game are great!
- the animations look fantastic
- the world is interesting
- the level design is good
- theres a lot of content, which is a double edged sword but still pretty impressive for a 3 day jam
but it feels like you went waaay too big in scale and ran out of time to truly debug and test the game, which would explain all the issues I mentionned. It's okay, the game is cool and has potential, but it could be great :)
I really liked the atmosphere and overall vibe. The soundFXs are really full of juicy here. The bar is quite cool! Quite a cool game overall!