This submarine exploration game offers a nice underwater experience with basic but immersive sound effects. The main menu stands out as a highlight, and the tutorial, while informative, could benefit from longer text display. The gameplay, while enjoyable, lacks depth, as it mainly involves swimming to information points without challenging obstacles. The flashlight feels unnecessary, and introducing the need to resurface could enhance gameplay. Considering it's a one-person, one-week project, it's a promising prototype with similarities to 'Iron Lung' that I'd like to see developed further. Really cool game! Glad I found it :)
Viewing post in The Deep Descent jam comments
Thanks for the in depth comment.
I'm not much of a sound designer; I'm still learning, but as long as the sounds creep out the player, its a win for me!
Some other people had trouble with the tutorial text disappearing too quickly, which is entirely on me, I could've very well fixed it in the time I had remaining, but thought it was fine for whatever reason. (Don't worry, I have a better fix planned for it).
That's actually a good idea to add obstacles, like maybe exploring caves or navigating around underwater mines.
I would argue the zoom feature is actually more useless than the flashlight, but I mainly added those features for more of a "realism" reason than a gameplay reason. I suppose I could incorporate those features better with the gameplay by having tasks require you to use them in the future.
The only real reason why I didn't add full resurfacing is that (and this was my number 1 reason) I didn't have any fish or any other sea life, and ascending upwards would make it feel unrealistic as there wouldn't be any sea life visible (kinda a weird reason looking back on it, but I also feel like the lack of sea life adds to the creepiness). The other reason is that it would take too long, especially in the later levels (which is a better reason than that previous one, but I do think the exploration gamemode will require you resurfacing all the way and descending all the way down).
I was waiting for someone to relate my game to Iron Lung. I tried not to make it too similar to that game, as I of course want this to be it's own creation, but there are some similarities (who knows, maybe I could add the Iron Lung monster into this game in the future ;)
Sorry if I waffled on for too long, I sometimes write these long comments as notes for myself on what to add for the full release, but any other suggestions are welcome.