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A jam submission

Darkening DescentView game page

Delve deeper into a mysterious Tower buried deep within one of Saturn's moons, Titan.
Submitted by PapaSpoonRattler (@SirSpone) — 29 minutes, 41 seconds before the deadline
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Darkening Descent's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics#1383.7003.700
Innovation#4542.5502.550
Theme#4682.9502.950
Game Design#5152.5002.500
Overall#5182.5582.558
Fun#5732.2502.250
Audio#7291.4001.400

Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
You dive deeper into a mysterious Tower to find untold secrets

Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
I wrote all the code except for the Pathfinding.
I did all the Pixel Art.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Nice little Metroidvania that you made!  It seemed like the enemies took way too many shots to kill them and the controls weren't intuitive.  

Developer

Thank you! I originally had no intention to make it feel Metroidvania like but turned out like that in the end! The enemies and controls are being worked on currently and will be fixed after the voting period!

Submitted(+1)

Classic type of game! I found that you could often just jump or dive through things and avoid most of the gameplay. Otherwise I liked the art style, very cool you did it all yourself. You might also need a disclaimer on your page in the description about the Thank You For Playing screen, because the text makes it sound like you are adding new cut content during the voting period which had me concerned, whereas when I scroll down in the comments it seems like this cut content will actually be added after the voting period :D Best of luck with polishing and adding to your game after!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for playing and the feedback! Yea I wasn't aware until after the voting started that we weren't allowed to update during said voting period so lead to that hiccup. As for the jumping and diving through most things, I came across this as well and realized this would need to be fixed in the polish!

Submitted(+1)

wow. Amazing art. 👏  the aviation were clean too. The lighting also gave a good sense of mood. How long have u been doing pixel art? Your stuff looked so good. Welll done. Solid entry 👌 

Developer

Thank you! I actually don't have much experience with 2D or pixel art, I dabbled a bit after my first game jam but I usually stick with 3D modeling and level design.

Submitted(+1)

amazing. It honestly look like u are a pro. Well done indeed. 👏 

Submitted(+1)

Looking forward to sound :) Pretty game

Developer(+1)

You and me both. Thank you!

Developer (3 edits) (+1)

Major Bugs Patched

  • FPS no longer hits rock bottom when in the "Main Stage"
    • First time using Unity's 2D lighting system and apparently the shadow casting script doesn't play well w/ tile maps, and there seems to be no way to bake these lights. 
    • Reduced number of shadows casted drastically
  • Locked doors no longer open and make you fall into limbo
Developer (1 edit) (+1)

From now on, all additional updates will be released after the voting period on September 11th, 2023 at 5:30 PM EST

The updates will consist mostly of cut content.

Submitted(+1)

Feel jittery and hard choice of controls. The game concert looks great so I would love to check your game again after the game jam ends.

Developer(+1)

Thank you! Hope to see you back. I agree the controls aren't great, due to poor time management, it lead to a not so great control scheme. In terms of jitter, did you play the WebGL version or downloadable version? If the downloadable version, could you expand on what felt jittery?

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I used the WebGL one, maybe this is what affects my gameplay.

edit: I tried it again after your update and it seems better performance now! Great job!

Submitted(+1)

Add sound to the game and it will be better

But Why J to shoot ?(

good game

Developer

Thank you! I do agree with the sound and will be added after voting. As for the controls, additional mechanics were to be added that influenced this decision originally but those mechanics were never added so it instead lead to a bad design decision.

Submitted(+1)

Nice movement, nice animation, hard to figure out you shoot with J!, good game.

Developer

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

Hi,

The games was interesting at first look but I had some really bad performance issues. The gameplay  was quite jittery and I didn't understand much. On the first try I tried going right and fell through the map resulting in me having to restart. On the second playthrough I went left and stumbled upon some cratures which were very hard to see and killed me very fast because I didn't know of any key or button to shoot.

I can say based on the other comments that there is potential in the game but you have to optimise the game and put some visual information. 

I hope I wasn't harsh

Cheers!

Developer

Your comment was not harsh at all. I agree with all your points! The game was lacking within many elements such as visual feedback and information (and more) and all the controls were displayed in the desc., but I knew it wouldn't do too much. I thank you for giving and honest review and trying it despite running into major bugs!

Submitted

No problem at all,

We are here to support each other. I would like to see the game developed further so I can play it and enjoy it fully.

Bye for now and good luck further ahead!

Submitted(+1)

The game felt a little laggy. Idk why that was. I think audio would've added a lot and some more content perhaps but it looked cool!

Developer

Yea I focused too much on art than gameplay, but glad you liked the way it looked! The game was laggy because of the way I set up pathfinding so I plan on fixing that when I update the game, including adding major things missing like audio, UI, additional enemies and more. 

Submitted(+1)

Nice game. I missed some SFX, firing a gun without the pews is not the same thing haha But congratulations!

Developer

Thank you! I agree so much! Sucks too cause I was so close to finishing implementing the SFX. The fact that there's not much feedback does take a lot away.

Submitted(+1)

I really liked the concept of a drone that provides your lighting and the character designs are really cool.  Some feedback:

The jittery movement makes it seem like your movement calculations are done in the Update() method instead of FixedUpdate(), or you're mixing it across both methods. If you're applying an movement to a rigid body in Unity, try switching it all to the FixedUpdate method to see if that helps. I had the same problem with mine and spent a day trying to figure it out.

The intro enemies take a lot of damage, maybe make them one shots while players adapt to controls.


All around I'm excited to see the next iteration of this and can't wait to try it out. Great job!

Developer

Thank you! Yea the movement was in FixedUpdate() and I misremembered how the FPS affected each Update method so I moved it. As for the enemies, there was an enemy in the works that did a better job of introducing combat that was cut, including a ranged enemy as well. I appreciate the feedback and hope to see you back after the voting period for the next update!

Submitted(+1)

Rlly apreciated the pixelart, well done! The idea with the dark areas, where you need the light of your drone is also a cool idea, maybe you can expand that thing in the future!

With some sound effects and music this can be a fun game!

Developer

Thank you! The darkness mechanic was supposed to have a lot more features (Additional lights, debuffs, vfx, etc). After the voting period, UI, FX, and more will def be added.

Submitted(+1)

Will definetly check it out then :D

Submitted(+1)

I really like the look of this game; well done with the pixel art! Personally, when running this game, I was getting really low FPS and it lagged a lot (inputs felt unresponsive), which I'm guessing is related to pathfinding that could be optimized, based on the game description. It made the game really hard to play; I ended up just heading left and found a hole that I jumped in, and the credits showed up. I can't say much about combat or the use of the flying drone because of that, but the idea is pretty cool. It feels like you could turn this into a Metroidvania style game where you explore the caverns.

Overall, well done on submitting this entry for your second game jam! Would love to see you add more to it and optimize even further.

Developer

Thank you! Yea I sadly didn't have any time to polish and optimize due to poor time management. However I do wanna expand on it more, mostly cause I know it can be better. I will probably put up a downloadable version so it is more playable.

Submitted(+1)

Epic game!

Submitted(+1)

Wow! What a stunning game!