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A jam submission

The Depths That CallView game page

In this dark fantasy FPS, wield spell and steel as you descend into a forgotten subterranean city
Submitted by K41-Games — 2 days, 29 minutes before the deadline
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The Depths That Call's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall Fun#443.8333.833
Art / Graphics#813.6673.667
Controls / UI#973.1673.167
Sound/Music#973.3333.333

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Ai Usage

AI Assisted

Genre

Action

Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing

Rating

For 13+

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Comments

(1 edit)

Sorry for the delay in posting this review, and thanks for requesting the review and hanging out in chat!  I'm behind in posting all of these, so I'll keep the text portion short, let be know if you need me to expand on anything.  The gameplay mechanics and combat feel pretty good, though the difficulty does seem to ramp quickly.    During the set piece fights where the enemies respawn in waves, it feels like the waves respawn just slightly too often.  The reflecting of magic is cool, however it may be a bit much for some players to aim and hit at the same time.  Possibly add a toggle for a less effective auto-aim for reflections.

The VOD for the review is linked below, and will be available for 60 days from the day of broadcast (as a note the game is muted specifically in the VOD to preemptively prevent DMCA issues):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2887760711?t=0h43m0s

We discussed a few things, your plans for the future of the game and I filled in the form at the end of the demo but for posterity's sake I'll talk a bit here as well.

As I stated the movement is great, genuinely quite fun to mess around with, my only gripe was with the magic grapple which is a bit hard to control.
You had mentioned you plan to make it a roguelike with meta progression and the like which sounds super promising and we talked a bit about ideas for how that'd look like, you had mentioned punishing the player in some way but I believe losing is punishment enough as the whole point is to learn and grow when it comes to these types of games.
Not to mention you have that curse/corruption mechanic which is a risk vs reward thing already.

I do hope there's an overarching story/goal to the progression since it's a great setting and I do like a bit of lore haha.

Thank you for stopping by the stream and I look forward to seeing what you do with the game!

Gameplay 01:40:09

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing, super useful feedback! I'm working on filling in a sort of alpha version of the roguelite+meta-progression stuff now, and I decided you were right not to punish the player for dying (though in future versions or at least later levels, you'll have limited revives). I hope I have time to add some lore eventually too :). I let you know when I have a new demo for you to check out!

Hey K41-Games!

I had a ton of fun playing this, and was looking for a bit more. I know we mentioned quite a few things during the stream, but I wanted to put some notes here for you for reference. Also, YAY PIG! (no spoilers)

  • First off, Music. Music-wise, there was that one section that felt and sounded like Halo, but that's cause of the percussive pattern. You can throw in some other melody over it a bit while keeping the rhythm to make it sound less like Halo, but still keep that feeling it creates.  
  • As for the SFX, we spoke about varying the projectile sounds. I did another playthrough after you had to go, and I also noted that there was a lack of footstep SFX. I feel that, for the hound-like creatures in particular, footsteps would add a bit more tension as the hounds get closer, while also adding an element to help locate and anticipate the direction of the hounds more.
  • The grapple points look too much like the lighting.
  • The field of view circle feels too small, like a flashlight and could be just a bit larger for the sake of combat, but it does a great job of hiding the sides while feeling natural when it comes to my ultrawide monitor, so don't increase it too much either.
  • The level design so far is great for the experience of traversing but I feel like the boss room hindered my experience, as it didn't leave much space for beating it without dying. It was crammed, without a means to pull behind anything to really hide, especially when all the other enemies spawn.
  • Pretty sure you have more that you are going to add, so there isn't much to say about adding more enemies and making the game longer, or adding more biomes to the game.

I look forward to playing more! Keep up the good work, and hope you keep me in mind!

Regards,

- Glim
GlimMusic.com

Developer

Hi Glim! 

Thanks again for playing!! Good catch on that footstep SFX bug! I actually had implemented this at some point but something I did messed it up and I never noticed them disappear, I will have to track it down! I will let you know when I have a longer more filled out demo available for you to check out! 

Best,

Jacob 

Submitted

A relatively short but sweet demo for what has the potential to be a pretty good FPS.

- Ran quite poorly on my machine, being consistently stuck around 20 fps. I can't fully blame this on the game, since my computer is rather low-end, but perhaps some additional optimisation would be beneficial, since judging by the graphics it probably *could* run better (I choose to blame the AI code bits). The low fps did end up making the combat feel awkward, but since that's probably an issue with my computer I won't count that against it. Unfortunatley that limits the feedback I can give about said combat, but I can still comment on the mechanics.

+ I liked the lightning grappling hook spell. Having the player automatically use the sword at the end of it was a good idea, and it was even better after getting the chain lightning upgrade for it. It also seems like it can be used like a gravity gun to grab and launch props which is cool, though I didn't really get to use it in combat.

+ The art is general is good. I liked the dogs and the flying creatures in particular. The wand could maybe use some more dynamic animations though.

+ Good feedback on player actions for the most part. The sword had nice sound effects, and the enemies did too.

- Mouse sensitivity started out way too high.

- The area where there are enemies respawning and you need to deactivate the spell was a little bit confusing. Usually in games like this I'm used to having to fight through multiple waves of spawning enemies, but after going for a while I realised they spawn infinitely until you deactivate all 3 orbs.

- The boss was somewhat confusing too, I'm not exactly sure which of my attacks damaged it. Judging by it's design, it looks like you have to run around the big shield at the front to shoot the glowy particle core, but hitting said core had no different feedback, and when I did kill it the final blow was with one of the spike seed grenade things that hit the shield at the front (though that might have just splash-damaged the core). 

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!! I wish I could blame the AI code bits too, but the performance issues are probably due to my shaders + vfx, another player also said they experienced lag during blood splatters (there is a performance killer having to do with some shader tricks that I *thought* I fixed too but will need to double check, same with the way it handles occlusion culling).  You *can* use the hook as a gravity gun, although I didn't supply any exploding barrel-type things in this version (the statue heads can be picked up and thrown through enemies but the player is strong enough against individual enemies that it isn't necessarily worth the time to actually do). Thanks for the feedback about the confusing parts, definitely need to work on some of these clarity things for the next version. Anyway, thanks again! 

Developer

ok I hopefully fixed the performance issues or at least made it less horrible -- there is kind of a design flaw baked into the way I wrote my shaders that does what I thought was a cool trick but (a) it is terrible for performance and (b) to my knowledge, no playtester has ever noticed :).  Solid first game mistake.