You are a ship defending the seas against a nightmarish force from the depths creating evil sea creatures that are attacking unsuspecting vessels.
You must move your ship left and right across the game area and drop depth charges on the creatures below. There are various creatures with different abilities, but the red Grabbers are the ones to look out for, as they will attempt to drag friendly vessels down to the depths. If a Grabber reaches the bottom with one of the ships, you lose the ship permanently. If you lose all friendly ships, or your ship is destroyed, its game over.
Every now and then, a lost city will begin to ascend from the deep. At this point you need to focus your attack on it before it fully surfaces! Don't worry about the grabbers, they will leave the ships alone while the city is rising. Watch out for the super nasty Protector creatures that the city spawns!
An Xbox 360 controller is recommended for this game! Use the left analog stick to move left and right, and A button to fire.
Keyboard-wise you may use A and D, or the cursor keys to move, and right shift to fire. Left mouse button also fires.
A game by Nega Drive for Ludum Dare 29.
Art and Sound by Richard Dunn Coding by Matthew Jenkins
Created in Unity. Graphics created using Photoshop and Flash. Sound created in FL Studio, BFXR and Audacity.
The font used is an vectorised version of 'BM Germar' found on dafont.com.
Really nice with the menu screen, it caught my interest directly! The gameplay was solid too. The audio gave a really nice mood to everything :)
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Chinchilla29 Apr 2014, 12:25
Nice artwork, I really like the look of the huge red spider things dragging your ships down. Would have liked a health bar or something for the cities, its not obvious whether you're dealing any damage to them. Weapon upgrades would be great too, the player weapon seems pretty puny! A solid entry!
Now that is a great game! I really enjoy these simple games very well done rather than the ones who try to be fancy and end up feeling unaccomplished. Great job!
I liked the fact that the ships resurfaced if you manage to kill the biggies that pull them down :-) - I liked the mechanics, it felt solid. The music was okay, but maybe something a bit more dark or sinister would've added a lot to the mood! - Well done!
Well put together game. Lacks some kind of difficulty increase and something to give it a bit more depth. Some nice opportunity in this game to play on the inevitable doom of the player that is not really used.
well designed game with solid mecanics. The shooting is frustrating though, it's too difficult to aim. One don't loose 'cause the game is becoming too fast (like in good arcade games) but because missiles are inefficient...
I like the graphics, very simple and flash-like but especially the monsters had a consistent visual style. The only real complaint I have is that using the Shift key for shooting is slightly annoying, as Windows kept giving me a prompt about toggling on Ease of Access settings every few presses.
A good game in nearly all respects. The only thing I found lacking were power-ups, which would've added a little variety to the gameplay and perhaps made it possible to survive a little longer. The usage of the shift key is also an issue on Windows.
At first, I thought, well, another polished but generic entry and then the city/boss came and I loved it. I'd like to see more bosses, with different behaviours, and maybe a life bar for the enemies. Game controller was a big plus.
At the first run I quickly lost two ships before understood how to play and got 28700. On the second run I lost only one ship but got less than 10000 because of strange island came from the deep and spawned strong enemies. On the third try I got about 18000 and saved all ships but strange island killed me again. Hmm... looks like this game should be more balanced.
Anyway, great work, I lile graphics, music and simple gameplay. Weel done!
Simple and easy to learn. Maybe some powers and upgrades make this game better. I like the tension when undercity is coming out and a lot of monster shows up!
Nice! The music was really good for the atmosphere, and I liked that the red monsters clutched the ships and you could then free them. That was innovative. Good job!
The game looks really nice. I found it a little too easy and it got tedious fairly quickly unfortunately. I was basically just doing well enough by holding down the fire button and strafing left and right. Seems like a solid concept, but just needs some changes to make it more exciting and fun. I'd mess with pacing, powerups, speed of the attacks, restriction of playfield width potentially. I guess those are the parameters I'd experiment with to see if it could be made more fun/exciting/challenging. Very well polished at least!
Thanks for all the comments and criticisms everyone! We are currently working on a post-jam version with more balanced gameplay, and yes, POWERUPS! Hooray! And some sneaky secret extra stuff. Stay tuned.
Great graphics and super nice game! I included it in part 11 of my Ludum Dare compilation video if you'd like to check it out :) http://youtu.be/-vf2U372Ego
You make a nice "Depths Invaders". I found the boats to be protected are a little too passive. These ships may play interesting roles or functions to enlarge gameplay. For example: a repair ship, defendera ship (short range), ammunition ship supply (to allow sending a powerful bomb)
10850. For a moment I thought the game was fundamentally broken. I thought I could just defend my last ship from the grabbers but then... The city stared coming out of the ocean and the music started getting more... evil. Dang, that was tense.
I really like the graphics, and the music and sound effects work well enough (although I would've liked them a bit darker for such a game). I'm not sure if the game played on the right speed for me! If it did, it was a LOT too fast - the red things didn't even take two seconds to appear and completely pull a ship under, and I have to get in position first to protect it and hit two of those puny missles.
Glad to hear some sound since it's usually neglected. Gameplay was good once I realized I could hold the mouse button down to continuously drop mines :) I liked the warning symbol to let you know one of the ships is being taken; it's simple but easy to overlook. I think my favorite part is how the ships slowly right themselves when they reach the top of the water and play a water noise when surfacing.
This should be a Samuel L. Jackson movie called "Alien motherf*ckers stole my motherf*cking ship again!" :P It's fun how the ship floats back to the surface and is completely fine too :)
Nice arcade game, it works really well! I find using a mouse for boolean input (ie. firing in a fixed direction) is a travesty that should no go unpunished though ;)
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Liked the gameplay, is was addictive, nice job.
Fun game, Liked the different monsters.
Anyway, great work, I lile graphics, music and simple gameplay. Weel done!
Maybe some powers and upgrades make this game better.
I like the tension when undercity is coming out and a lot of monster shows up!
I found the boats to be protected are a little too passive. These ships may play interesting roles or functions to enlarge gameplay. For example: a repair ship, defendera ship (short range), ammunition ship supply (to allow sending a powerful bomb)
Nice arcade game, it works really well!
I find using a mouse for boolean input (ie. firing in a fixed direction) is a travesty that should no go unpunished though ;)