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Dungeon Diver's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game? | #7 | 4.323 | 4.323 |
| Gameplay - How fun is it to play? | #16 | 3.839 | 3.839 |
| Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing? | #18 | 4.323 | 4.323 |
| Overall | #19 | 3.787 | 3.787 |
| Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme? | #53 | 3.290 | 3.290 |
| Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music? | #100 | 3.161 | 3.161 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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i have to agree with the previous comments that this game was awesome!! Keep on working at what you are doing cause you are making some good stuff:)
Thanks for playing our game. We're working on it still but it's taking a while to expand it to a full game, we're finding.
At this point I don't know what to do. As one of the judges, I want to say this was the best games submitted. BUT, I also want to write a very thick book on game design AND THEN BEAT YOU ABOUT THE NECK AND SHOULDERS WITH IT!
You have a lot of exploration elements in your level design which you increase nicely as you go further in, BUT you have not just one timer, but TWO! You have a timer on lighting and then you stack another timer for air. I HATE timers in any game. I even hate timers that just tell me how long it took me to finish, even if it means nothing, because just the fact that it is there puts pressure on. YOU put two timers into a game where I'm expected to take my time exploring and even finding hidden secrets. Time I spend exploring takes away from time I have left to finish the game.
IF and I do mean IF, buddy! Grrr. If I put you down as one of my top five, expect a nice bit where I talk about things I liked AND THEN A SCATHING RANT ON YOUR F'ING TIMERS. ...And maybe a lesson on how to remove them, but still have a nice mechanic, but only if I'm in a good mood.
Also, can you actually win? I gave up trying to out smart the boulder.
Thank you so much for even considering to play our game. Your comments are gold dust to us, and it's one reason we were so excited for this year's jam. Your feedback is the real prize for us.
We're glad you enjoyed the exploration parts about our level design. We wanted a game that was more than just combat focused, although we're very aware our combat mechanics need work too.
We wrestled a lot with the flare and oxygen mechanics during the jam, going backwards and forwards on the length of time a flare should last, how long an oxygen tank should last, or whether we should even have them at all. We took the jam as an opportunity to test this out, and get some feedback, and boy did we get feedback on it! We're leaning towards removing the flares altogether and swapping them out for a lantern which never goes out. We're also thinking that the oxygen tank (or a similar device) is something that doesn't run out, but is something that you have to equip in order to go under water for longer than you can hold your breath for.
We would love to hear any more feedback you have, and please rant away at us, we are listening. This is only our second game jam, and our third game ever (we've not yet commercially released anything), and we're still developing our game design skills. We're entirely open to any and all advice and critique.
The game is winnable, and the boulder can be avoided, but only if you knew about the hidden wall mechanic, which we never introduced the player to at any point. We realize is another game design flaw. With it being a Dungeon Crawler Jam, we were expecting our audience to know about hidden walls, but we shouldn't have assumed that. Just before the pit you can side step to the left through a hidden wall into a corridor which brings you out the other side of the pit (click on the image to see the full map on Sketchfab):
Arlorean (Adam) and Carodan (Dan) from Rebello Games.
It's an incredibly sprawling game! Really interesting theme, loved the environment though it's absolutely huge! Took me ages to get through it. The free-look mechanic really helped with far quicker navigation though, this was an ace addition.
Sad there were no checkpoints. I was doing really well, collected so many bags (18 or so) and around 23 gold, but when picking up the totem (presumably near the end), I had no idea where to go other than straight - plummeting to my death. Was pretty devastated to find I had to start from the beginning as I wanted to see it through.
Huge variety of things to pick up, and kiting the enemies made for good combat, along with the slider that allowed you to land critical hits, while juggling between the cooldowns of different weapons.
Really interesting premise and a lot of stuff at play here! Good job! Wish I knew what happened at the end!
Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. We spent the best part of a day creating the load/save feature and then didn't add in an auto-save-checkpoint feature, which would have been 5 minutes extra work. Sorry about this. There was a load/save bug where enemies that were killed still blocked their square on reload so if you are going to try again, maybe wait for our post-jam release which fixes this bug and adds some other features (and possibly bugs). To get all the way to the end and then die must have been so frustrating, we feel your pain. You were only about 10 squares from the end of the game!
Did you find any of the @Zooperdan trophies? There were 12 to collect... :)
The Zooperdan trophies??? I don't think so! I just found the pedestal one at the end? I felt I was super thorough, so absolutely no idea where you could've hidden anything else - very cool to hear I was missing stuff! Don't worry about the saving/loading. I noticed it after I'd died, but wasn't expecting a save/load system in a 7 day jam, so even that's impressive too!
Very impressive game. I enjoyed it. I had some issues with bugs that I see some other people had but I still really enjoyed my time and think that you guys did a great job.
Thanks for playing our game. We appreciate the feedback. Sorry about the bugs. They will of course all be fixed in version 2.0... ;)
We look forward to playing your game soon.
Stacked my flares together, don't know how to lit one after the first one ran out. Proceed to throw all my flares into the darkness never to be retrieved again.
The game feels really polished. Although the PgUp/PgDown to go up and down is a little bit hard for me since I do not have the PgUp/PgDown as their own buttons but merged into the arrow keys which I also need to press my Fn key for them to work.
Many thanks for playing our game. We're sorry you fell foul of the stacked flares and dropping them in the dark. We've fixed this for our post-jam update, coming out on Saturday. We no longer stack flares and we're adding an emissive texture to the them so you can see them in the dark! Good call on the PgUp/PgDn, other people mentioned the same thing. We're moving those to the R/F keys. We're looking forward to playing your game soon.
Sure will!
Great entry! I did encounter some issues however which then also stopped me from playing through the game unfortunately.
First bug I encountered was by loading during having cooldown on my spear. The Cooldown will then get stuck, even in the loaded game. Once you restart the game, it fixes the bug.
The more severe issue was invisible walls. If I load the game I get invisible walls which I cannot pass anymore. There is this huge underwater room with the key at the top. You enter the room by jumping into a tile in the center of the room and going down. and then forward. However that was not possible anymore after reloading. I then replayed the game to the same point and it worked again. I saved, but died at a point later, reloaded, and now had a different invisible wall I couldnt pass. So basically load/save wasn't possible for me as it broke the game.
I am almost certain that invisible walls appear (after reloading) only either where an enemy died or where a dead enemy appeared. Therefore I completed the game by saving only at points where I would not have to go back (starting with the first big underwater section I'd say there are 3 big sequences and I saved between those), I think if you really want to get to the end right now it's possible this way (and yes the game is totally amazing).
Ah, alright! Yeah, now I see and understand your previous comment. Thanks! Will give it another try and try to avoid saving with dead enemies infront of me.
Hey @Kordanor, many thanks for playing our game. You're right, there seems to be a window where the cooldown mechanic locks up, thanks for pointing that out to us.
Sorry about the invisible walls bug, it was due to dead enemies leaving their tile blocked on reload after save. This caught a lot people out and was actually working until close to the end of the jam where we decided to try to remove dead enemy graphics, instead of just leaving them there, and we missed out a line of code to clear the tile (so annoying but mistakes are easy to make). This was our first attempt at a Load/Save feature and we did it because the game play was easily over an hour and we didn't want people to have to restart from the beginning each time. We've learned a lot about what works, and what doesn't work, doing this jam, which is great for our game development journey.
If you do get stuck again, and you're playing on Windows, we can edit your game save to fix it for you so you can continue. Feel free to DM @Arlorean on Discord for this.
We've already fixed this, and many other things pointed out to us (by people reviewing the game), for a post-jam update. Hopefully we might even go on to make a commercial version of this too (free Steam key for you of course Mr Judge😊).
Very solid submission, you have so many components of a complete game, that it feels like a complete game. I enjoyed playing it, though combat felt a bit slow and a bit unresponsive.
Very good tutorial and level design, it looks like it was really thoroughly planned.
Many thanks for playing our game. We tried to make it as complete as we could in the time. Sometimes that has its own cost as we missed some audio effects out when we ran out of time. We'll definitely work on the combat to make it more engaging and faster paced, thanks for the feedback on that. We're glad you like the tutorial elements and the level design. We did do a lot of planning and if you want to know more, feel free to check out our devlog that explains how we did it all:
https://rebello.itch.io/dungeon-diver/devlog/514563/how-we-made-dungeon-diver
Great atmosphere. Smooth movement.
I had some trouble lighting the flares, until I figured out you have to un-stack them.
Solid submission, great job!
Thanks for playing our game, we're glad you enjoyed it. A lot of people had problems with the flares so we've tweaked how they work for our post-jam release. They no longer stack is the major change (and they last longer). We look forward to playing your game soon. Best of luck in the jam.
"Game completed - Congratulations"
This was amazing.
I think the save system does not work properly, the tiles where you left dead enemies are now stuck. When I realised that I just saved at points where I could not go back and it worked.
I did not use the dynamite, where you supposed to use it for the boulder stack, at first?
It took me a while, it took me some time to find the first underwater key, the maze I mapped with pen and paper and it's actually not that big so it went fast but then the last sequence I truggled with, in part because I did not want to save and get stuck so I kept restarted the entire sequence and got smashed by the boulder a couple of times before finding the right solution to the boulder problem.
The game looks and sounds great. More important since you dealt with 6 directions, it controls great (for some reason pgup and pgdown did not work, but right click is perfect).
Combat works, I was doubtful at first but after you get the knife it does not waste your time. You can step dance if you want to but don't have too and I think it's fine this way.
However the best part of the game is obviously not the combat. The dungeon is excellent, it's just traditional dungeon mechanics put into a 6 direction maze, and it works great.
You've got an involved inventory system and resource management is good too.
The game is quite big, and I loved every sequence. Congratulations.
Thank you so much for playing our game, and for completing it. Thanks for the telling us about removing the rock pile at the end without the dynamite. We treat the rock pile as a barrel and yes, you can indeed remove it with the crowbar we just found! Doh!!!
Sorry about the load/save problem with the enemies still blocking the square. It was a bug we introduced at the end of the jam when trying to get enemies to disappear once you'd killed them, and we missed a crucial line of code.
We'll definitely work on making combat more engaging post-jam.
Feel free to check out our devlog if you want to see more in depth how we did it all:
https://rebello.itch.io/dungeon-diver/devlog/514563/how-we-made-dungeon-diver
Combat is good enough and your timing twist is fine, it was perfect for the jam.
If you expand on it I'd say that in this kind of real time games what can be fun about it too is fighting enemies under doors, make them fall into a pit by stepping on a plate at the right moment, in your case you can have harpoon traps underwater that the player has to avoid but can then be used to their advantage to damage enemies, maybe something triggering mines is possible too although I can't think of a good way to do it right now.
I forgot to mention the enemies' name in my previous comment, giving cute names to things you're going to smash is rude and hilarious, I love it.
Hey, I played your game :)
Overall, you really need to make a commercial game out of it :) A 5/5 game, so not looking as a 7-day jam entry :) Definitely on my radar for the future, please continue on this :)
Thanks you so much for playing our game, and your kind words. We do plan on making a commercial game out of this. We did our best to pack in as much content as we could into the 7 days. Hopefully we can expand on it a lot more in the coming months. Take a look at our devlog if you want to get an idea of how we did it:
https://rebello.itch.io/dungeon-diver/devlog/514563/how-we-made-dungeon-diver
Thank you for bringing this to my attention in the discord chat. I would have missed it out otherwise. I really liked the unusual scenario for the game. It reminded me a bit of "The Forest", which has similar "cave-diving" levels. Claustrophobic underwater mazes with survival elements is a cool mix and makes for a great creepy athmosphere. :)
I too had problem in the first underwater passage, but reading the comments helped me with the movement controls. I also died on the first stone trap later on. Didn't save until then, haha. Should have made a warning there, had to start from the beginning again. Apart from that it was pretty smooth sailing though. Dungeon gets more creepy the later you are in the game. :D Also lol@ the final trap at the end.
There are also a lot of cool mechanics in the game, like the pushing crates around or destroying barrels, the rock traps, etc. You managed to do a lot of stuff there and it adds some great depth.
I enjoyed it thoroughly. :)
Many thanks for playing our game, it was good to chat to you about yours in Discord too. Sorry about the lack of information on the free-look to dive. The falling rocks trap at the start was a bit brutal without checkpoint saves, we're glad you persevered. Glad you liked the final "Indiana Jones" moment, it was fun coming up with that one. We'll be fixing everything you spotted post jam so thanks for the feedback, it really helps us get better as game developers. Well done for finishing our game and congratulations on Whispers of Fate again, it really is a great achievement for a single person in 7 days.
Nice game, very atmospheric and beautiful to see
The gameplay works, I did had fun exploring these carverns.
The only little flaws were :
- No sound to inform the oxygen tank is about to get empty as the HUD hides while in free-look which is always kept on while exploring the deep blue, especially at the end with the big submerged grotto in which we have to explore each bit of it to find the next way to go
- I did accidentaly dropped a coin while trying to grab it and could not ever after grab it again, though maybe it was just bad luck and fell where the raycast could not reach it
- Autosaves so dying would not make us start all over again
- Informing us about using the freelook button to dive (unless I missed the instruction?)
Anyway, for the rest it's all fine, the gears offered is generous, we can manage to find our way without much extra help and the enemies offer a challenge but a well balanced one
A strong entry with a strong gameplay and visual
Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. You're so right about the lack of audio (and visual) feedback on the tank when it runs empty. We'll change it so the Oxygen tank to be visible all the time, even when free-looking. Physics is a fickle beast, and sometimes it has a mind of its own when it comes to collisions, even with continuous collision detection enabled, which should have avoided this very problem. Sorry we didn't add the autosaves in. We spent all that time doing load/save and adding in checkpoints would have been easy by comparison. It's coming post jam. We told you nothing about the free-look to dive and that was a mistake on our part. Again, it's coming post jam. Thanks for all the feedback, it's great to learn from what works and what doesn't. We saw your game being streamed earlier today and it looks very good. We'll be playing it soon.
Instead of mentioning everything I love about this game I'll list the things I would like to see changed or improved.
1) ...
Welp. How can I knock a game that put my ugly mug on a collectible? :)
Great job!
Thanks Zooperdan. We really appreciate you playing our game, it means a lot to us. We couldn't resist make you a collectible trophy, especially when you said how much you liked hidden walls, we added them in just for you! We'll make some fixes post-jam that should make it a bit smoother to play too. We're looking forward to you being 100% again and playing your entry into next year's jam!
I only managed to get to the under-water bit. Not sure if I was doing something wrong, but it seemed like I wasn't descending at the second drop-off.
But as far as I got it looked, sounded and played great. Very smooth interface.
I wasn't a fan of how many movement inputs it saved. For me, just remembering the next potential movement is ideal. Any more than that and I tend to over-shoot.
The flare stacking and respawning was a little annoying, but I assume that's not finished.
EDIT: I got it. I actually really like the free-look mode and the way it snaps to the closest grid view when you let go.
Thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. Good catch on the movements. We are queuing up more than one, perhaps we should just make it one as you suggest. The flare stacking is a work in progress for sure. We'll work on it post jam. We're relieved you worked out the free look mode. Sorry for not explaining it at any point! Another lesson learned by doing a game jam.
Thanks again for the feedback and we look forward to playing your game soon.
very atmospheric game i like it!
Great to hear and thanks for playing our game and giving us some feedback! We look forward to playing your game too.
This is great! Great graphics, great environment design, authentic dungeon-crawler "feel" to puzzles and gameplay.
Great job! :)
Thanks for the feedback and for playing our game. We look forward to playing your game soon.
Hey! I decided to check out your entry and I have to say I'm pretty impressed!
here are some things I liked
Here are some things I think can be improved on
Other than that a solid entry!!
Many thanks for playing our game, we really appreciate it. Glad you liked the graphics and the puzzle mechanics.
You're spot on about the enemy dying taking to long. We should have interrupted the animation as soon as the enemy was dead and then done the death animation. Instead we let their attack animation complete and then started the death animation. Another lesson learned!
You're right about the narrative as well. We did want to do an intro sequence that explained why you were in the cave. We had it as text in the itch.io page but that's never good enough really.
Again, you're so right. Sound effects were a last minute addition to the game and we ran out of time to put them everywhere we wanted to.
Thanks for the feedback. Great job with your game too.
I ran into a bug in the High Fall area that prevented me from continuing - it was once I had dropped the second crate that there was an invisible wall blocking my progress here:
I suspect that this was due to me saving and loading in that room earlier (I was facing out from the alcove in the switch after having dropped one crate when I did so).
No final thoughts yet - I'm planning on restarting from the beginning to see if it'll work for me if I don't save there, but I'm very impressed so far.
Many thanks for playing our game. It's great to see how far you got. Sorry about that load save bug. We'll fix it post jam for sure. Given your screenshot and description we were able to work out that any killed enemy keeps its grid square blocked when you reload, even though they're dead. For now, if you do save, make sure you can walk around the enemy before you kill it. Not the best workaround but it's all we've got for now.
You made it to point 5 in the map BTW. Good job, you're probably about 30% of the way through the whole game:
Dungeon Diver by Arlorean on Sketchfab
Went back to this to try again and beat it this time. Getting stuck was for the best, as I didn't miss the spear this time. I'm beyond impressed with how much work you both did. That murky area at the end was quite unsettling! My only suggestion would that it would've been nice to have some way to quickly add items to the inventory, as the drag target to put them into the general inventory was pretty small.
Thanks for persevering Kevin and we're glad you didn't fall fowl of the bug the second time around. You're absolutely right about the size of the quick drop inventory button being too small. We noticed ourselves but ran out of time to make it bigger. We'll make it bigger post release. Thanks for the feedback.
The visuals and systems feel very professional; I wouldn't be surprised to see these in a published game.
Unfortunately I drowned in the first underwater section, because I couldn't figure out how to ascend or descend; it's pretty tough to have a time limit when trying to figure out new controls without a tutorial! I absolutely get that it feels much nicer to be able to navigate the ladders above water with the ordinary direction buttons, but it might still have been best to force the player to learn the up and down controls then, rather than only requiring them when drowning? Also, I'm not sure whether you were able to implement saves/continue points (there is a "load game" in the main menu, at least?); if you were then I think one before the first drowning section would have been a very good idea (or even before the first combat; ideally you don't ever want players to be replaying the early sections of the game that have no challenges).
Still, a very solid entry overall (and of course as I've mentioned I'm a huge fan of the verticality), so great work!
Thanks for playing our game and we're especially grateful for you kind words. We hope to publish a game at some point in the future.
We should have done a tutorial on the controls for sure. It would have been easy, in hindsight, to at least put in a note somewhere to say to use the right mouse button or PgUp/PgDn. This is why it's great to cut your teeth on these things in a game jam like this. It's a reminder to not forget the basics of tutorials on game controls and mechanics.
We're really sorry we didn't add in a checkpoint system to auto save. We spent the best part of a day making sure load/save worked, doing the checkpoints would have been trivial in comparison and yet we missed it out. You are so right here.
Thanks for your very constructive feedback on our game. We look forward to playing your game this week, it look very stylish. Best of luck in the jam!
Ah, then was there a manual save? My bad, in that case; with manual saving that death would be on me. I guess it was on a menu I never opened.
Best of luck with your publishing ambitions!
The art/graphics in this entry are superb. I loved the the underwater aspect and want more!
The only real disappointment for me was a lack of music and sound effects.
Incredible work. I hope you release a post game jam version <3
Thanks for playing our game. We're glad you liked the graphics and artwork. We spent a long time getting things to look they way they do in game. The underwater part was a key mechanic to our interpretation of the duality theme so we're happy to see you want more of it! You're absolutely right about the sound effects. We ran out of time in the end to add them all in and it was disappointing for us too. We do plan on continuing to develop this game further. Many thanks for your feedback. We look forward to playing your game this week. Best of luck with the jam!