itch.io

Thanks for playing!

I'm glad to hear you liked the atmosphere! If I'm honest I think of this game as more "atmospheric game" than straight up "horror game", or at least that was the intention.

Regarding the movement, I wanted to implement queued moves or allowing turns while moving, but after a couple hours of trying I didn't make any progress and decided to just move on. A number of people have mentioned it and I have it on the to-do list post-jam. I'll probably increase the movement speed a little bit too.

So initially I had started out NOT showing the enemies on the minimap until they start chasing the player. The problem was I had setup this system in a very hacky way where I had to manually disable the minimap icons, and so I just forgot to disable the minimap arrows after the first couple enemies. I agree it was confusing, because combined with the minimap not showing walls it resulted in almost everyone I saw playing thinking the enemy by the dead diver was the first enemy. I've heard arguments for and against showing the enemy icons before encountering them. A couple players described it as similar to seeing the Xenomorph on the little trackers in Alien, and other players like yourself saying it spoils the tension. I think if the AI were a bit more active than reactive like the genestealers in Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels it could have been tense, but as it stands I'll probably change it post-jam.

So the - things -  are ghosts of the dead. They are the "anomalous signals commonly found near underwater human remains" as mentioned in the game page. I wasn't able to explain it well in-game so I think it confused a lot of people. But basically the apparitions are speaking to the player character in those distorted whispers you hear when first clicking on them. Those whispers are then decoded into the text displayed on screen. I should have explained those better, because I saw another video of a player walking right past all of the ghosts until reaching the Captain's Quarters. For context I got the idea from Pathways Into Darkness, an old FPS by Bungie where you could talk to dead people, but in that game you could actually type in topics to ask them about. I decided to keep the scope small and just limit it to one long line the dead say to the player and not add any ability for the player to speak back. Though from seeing the feedback it is confusing, with some players seeing them as literal audio logs. I mean functionally they are in hindsight, though they weren't directly intended as such.

The enemies being able to occupy the same tile as the player wasn't intentional, I just wasn't able to fix that in time. And the clipping through obstacles was also a bug that I only realized after release. Basically the way the map works is every tile is added into an A* map, then each point raycasts in all 4 directions, and if there's nothing detected between the points they're marked as bidirectional points. The problem comes in where the raycasts were not set to detect collisions if they spawned inside a collision object. So there's no real issues with the walls for example, but the enemies can swim through the turbines no problem because the A* points the turbines are on didn't detect any collision. I knew the combat was subpar, I just decided to focus on polishing every other aspect rather than have "ok" combat in a boring environment.

I am happy to hear the intentional parts of the combat worked for you though! I didn't want the player to be totally starved of ammunition, but I also didn't want it to be Doom. Same reason I spaced the fights out, hard to soak in the atmosphere if you're constantly fighting revived corpses.

The poor AI is actually why I never put more than one enemy in a fight at a time. To be honest I thought the eerie atmosphere of the game was going to be totally destroyed by the AI's shortcomings. I guess it's also why I continually think of the game as more of a dungeon crawler with an eerie atmosphere instead of a horror dungeon crawler. I genuinely did not think, and frankly still don't, that the mood would survive seeing multiple enemies clip into each other and turn 270 degrees to the right instead of 90 degrees to the left to face the player. As you mentioned the final area seems like it was made for a bigger fight, and it was! There was going to be sharks patrolling the area, and I even planned for some priestess type mermaids to be in the area right outside the pyramid and for some to swim out from the far distance of the deep ocean. By the final weekend I was strapped for time, and I knew the AI had issues, but I already had the level made. So I just left it empty so the player had the eerie experience of walking through the little forest of "offerings" talking to ghosts and waiting for something to happen. It was an anticlimax to be sure, one I hope to correct post-jam.

I would've loved a recording, but my best guess is the game is haunted. I saw a stream where the shark came back to life, and I personally experienced being attacked by an invisible enemy in the little area on the ship deck. I'm either a horror genius or a dunce, I'm not sure which :\

Thanks again for playing and leaving the detailed feedback!