Descent Protocol by fingolfin
Pilot a colossal drilling machine on a high-stakes mission to the center of the Earth. The core is unstable, and it's up to you to reach it in time to prevent a planetary catastrophe.
Keep the drill operational by managing vital resources: collect fuel to power the descent and gather water to cool the overheating engines. Inside the drill, play minigames to repair systems, refill tanks, and keep everything from falling apart.
Every level takes you deeper—can you keep the drill alive long enough to reach the core?
We recommend to play it Fullscreen, otherwise LudumDare page cuts the top bar of the game and the UI is not visible.
Controls:
- WASD To move
- E to interact
- Mouse to play Minigames.
What to do: * The Yellow button to open / close the doors. * The Red / Green button start / stops the drill. Just set it to "Stop" and Wait for it to stop and open the side doors to gather resources. The drill can't be started back unless the doors are closed. * The Blue button is the sonar. Use it to find resources. * Bring the fuel to the engine to restore the fuel bar. Use the water to cool down the engine. * Get down to 2000 mts to reach the core and see a cool ending!
| Link | https://baldeventertainment.itch.io/descent-protocol |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/descent-protocol |
Ratings
| Overall | 599th | 3.325⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 712th | 2.905⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 462th | 3.206⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 138th | 4.151⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 455th | 3.532⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 58🗳️ | 112🗨️ |
I suggest playing on itch.io, or play it on fullscreen, since the resolution here in Ludum's site ends up cutting the gauges of fuel and temperature on the top. 😅
Cool game!
The blue radar didn't appear to do much for me. It was likely user error, but each time I scanned, nothing was ever revealed to me. I ended up just stopping the drill arbitrarily and sometimes there were tunnels... sometimes there weren't.
The slow stop time of the drill was also a little confusing at first. It's a really cool thematic touch, but having some kind of additional feedback there would be helpful to indicate your "stop" button press actually worked and the drill is indeed stopping.
Overall very fun graphics and SFX. Could be cool to see the tunnels expanded upon to be more puzzle like. Or maybe there's defenses you have to put in place after a certain depth to fend off tunneling enemies! Lots of interesting directions you could take this. Well done!
I did find it funny that there's just a bunch of water jugs sitting underground for some reason, and that their labels would be backwards when walking to the left.
pressed the sonar. Still nothing. Then I just got a sign that I lost. I do not understand neither the conditions of victory, nor the conditions of defeat, nor what to do in this game.
I caught a bug at the end of the game, the fuel ran out a second before stopping on the floor with a new portion of fuel, and the pop-up screen, although it interfered, allowed the game to continue. When the fuel ran out, the doors opened again and allowed them to go completely behind the screen. All this time, the game completion screen with the restart button was hanging on top of the screen.

@smalltalkinc @sirblazealot @darwinigan @aynu @timelost Thank you all for playing our game! I know it's a bit confusing, that's why we added the description. I wish we had more time to build everything we wanted to add to the game. The sonar wasn't really functional at all, and the gameplay is a bit confusing! We also forgot to add collision to some walls 😅
To play you just need set the drill to stop, and it will stop on some pathways where you can grab resources. Each resource must be taken to their corresponding storage, with a little point & click minigame. Once you reach 2000 mts deep, you can see a very cool ending!
We wanted to add so much more, yet we didn't have enough time! We had tome ideas, like upgrading the drill, having an oxygen gauge, harder ways to get resources, more minigames, etc. But well, this is what we got, we were working until the last minute before the submission time!
Thank you all again! I hope somebody can reach the end! 😉
Visually, the game looks great -- I really liked the animations and the drill design. The atmosphere’s solid, and it feels pretty good overall.
That said, I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to reach the end. Several times I tried stopping the engine as soon as possible, and even then, I seemed to run out of resources before getting all the way through. Maybe I missed something?
Still, it’s a cool concept and awesome work!
The idea is to set the drill on stop and wait for it to stop, so you can get out, gather resources, and bring them back to the drill!
@duke-ua thanks for your feedback! As I said before, the idea is to put the drill on "Stop" and wait for it to stop automatically. We had to take some shortcuts for that functionallity, that's why we implemented it like a "bus stop", once it reaches a checkpoint it will stop, and allow you to go outside. There's not much to do, other than gather a simple resource tho, we wanted to do something a little bit more challenging on those paths, but didn't get quite there 😅
@glaupe-cabral thanks for playing! And thanks for your comment! We have some ideas on how to fix most of the flaws we got from the comments, not sure if we're gonna be implementing them soon tho. 😅
Thank you all!
As others have also mentioned, the gameplay was a bit confusing at first. Once I figured out how to operate the drill, the gameplay was kinda trivial, though. Start drill and immediately stop - fetch resources - repeat.
I think I also encountered a couple of bugs. I was able to exit the drill from the wrong side and go out of bounds. Also, for some reason I couldn't enter the engine minigame when playing fullscreen. Maybe it has something to do with the 32:9 aspect ratio in my monitor? I was carrying a fuel barrel but I couldn't activate the engine with E. In windowed mode it worked fine.
Oh yeah, and kudos for making a UI that scales decently with a 32:9 monitor. Usually LD games are completely unplayable for me in fullscreen. :sweat_smile:
However, I ran into some major confusion with the gameplay. At first, the "Stop" button on the drill didn’t seem to do anything, so I assumed the drill couldn’t be stopped once it was turned on. It wasn’t until I read the comments that I realized it was possible to stop it. After that, I kept trying to toggle it off, went up to the second level, pressed the blue button, and finally managed to stop it. I picked up a black item and reached what seemed to be the correct room — but once inside, I had no idea how to leave.
A similar issue happened on my third playthrough — I made it to a water tunnel, picked up the water, brought it to the right room, but got completely stuck at the "Open Fuel Tank" step. No matter what I tried, nothing worked, which was really frustrating.
The visuals and sound design are great, but I hope these gameplay issues can be fixed. It would also be really helpful if players continued to receive clear instructions after reaching the first tunnel and picking up an item — I think this would make the experience much more intuitive and enjoyable.
But... I couldn't figure out how to make it STOP drilling. I know you said that you set it to Stop and wait, but I waited and waited and it just kept going until I got a game over.