I'm working on a 3D underwater exploration game and so the theme hit close to home lol. My goal was to explore a tiny bit of the underwater platforming mechanics I am considering in 2D. I built the game in Pico-8 with no base code. Overall I spent 15 hours and 20 minutes on the game.

Deep Diver!

What if underwater platforming was fun?

Play here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-diver

Day 1

• 2 hours - getting going in pico-8 with a platformer tutorial. draw map tiles

• 2 hours - adding diving mechanic and improving controller state management
• 30 minutes - adding camera scrolling and following the character if they went by the edge of the screen
• 2 hours - adding extra dive boost if you held Z down, animations to the character, and tweaking physics valuoes
• 30 minutes - limiting dives to when you have dive resource. also add currents and air bubble mechanics to the level
• 2 hours and 45 minutes - refactoring the game to render spawned objects instead of using map data

Day 2

• 15 minutes - adding sfx to dives, pickups, getting hit, and restoring dives
• 6 hours minutes - make game support randomized infinite depth stages with difficulty increasing. There are probabilities of each thing spawning and it continually adds more depth as you go deeper. So you can go deeper and deeper as much as you can!
• 15 minutes - exporting Pico8 build and uploading to itch.io and ldjam

Play here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-diver

Overall

I had fun, and I got to see some folks fighting for the high score of who went the deepest :)

Next time: definitely use base code! I didn't get any chance to add VFX or menus, or any of advanced mechanics and fish I drew. I could've started with a game template and went from there.

I'm working on a 3D roguelike underwater platformer, you can follow me on Twitter if you're interested. Thanks for reading