Depth-First Search

by lpghatguy

co-authored: @eryn

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.33

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.20

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.98

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.29

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.17

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.70

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.02

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.30

Travel to the center of the galaxy using humanity's hyperspace wormhole infrastructure. At each hop, race against the clock to complete objectives stopping you from progressing deeper. Purchase upgrades with Quarks to improve your spaceship's maneuverability, survivability, and power.

Will you reach the center of the galaxy?

Crashing to desktop on launch? Your graphics drivers might not support Vulkan, upgrading them may help.

Tip: Having trouble controlling your ship? Try the Inertial Dampeners upgrade from the shop — only 10 Quarks!

🎮 Controls

* Move ship: `W`, `A`, `S`, `D`, `Space`, `C`
* Roll: `Q`, `E`
* Fire lasers: `Left Mouse`
* Jump to Hyperspace (when a level is complete): `G`
* Toggle Inertial Dampeners (when unlocked): `V`

💻 Technology

Written from scratch in Rust using wgpu-rs, rapier, egui, and many more great community libraries!

Depth-First Search automatically saves your progress regularly. If it crashes, it should pick back up where you left off when the game is reopened. You can delete 'save.json' to start over!

📝 Patch Notes

2020-04-28

* Fixed game getting stuck if you die after winning a level. Now, you'll instead get a little bit of bonus health!

2021-04-27

* Fixed hit markers not appearing when alien eggs are hit with lasers (Reported by pandepic)
* Fixed crash from trying to access bonus memory
* Fixed enemies shooting themselves, spamming you with hit marker noises
* Fixed enemies shooting their own eggs
* Fixed random collection objectives sometimes being impossible to complete
* Fixed eyes insta-killing players upon spawning

📷 Screenshots

Comments21

pandepic27 Apr 2021, 03:07

This was a lot of fun to play, my only problem with it was just not having hit indicators on some things like the alien eggs which makes it hard to know if your shots are doing anything. Nice graphics but the audio was really repetitive.

Cornflowerblue27 Apr 2021, 03:20

I found it hard to control at times, but it was fun over all and I liked the graphics.

Whysguy5227 Apr 2021, 03:34

Nice! Reminds me of Everspace, which is a good game. Controls are a bit slippery, even with the inertial dampeners but turning feels nice.

Omaewander27 Apr 2021, 10:33

was a little bit hard to controle, but still fun game! Cool!

Sasashasa27 Apr 2021, 13:51

As previously written - it is difficult to control the ship. Because of this, I could not reach the first hyperspace.

Hojaverde27 Apr 2021, 18:45

Very fun game, love the dog fight mechanics. The Q for any reason disappeared. Overall a nice game

carpaccino27 Apr 2021, 18:52

it was indeed hard to control the ship. I achieved 3 levels.

Daniel Whittaker28 Apr 2021, 20:32

Hard to control (but could just be im not used to this type of game), cool effects and audio and feels really pollished! Great work

aaranos29 Apr 2021, 03:52

The upgrades are very noticeable. I had fun playing this one, it definitely doesn't feel like a game jam game in that it feels more complete. Well done.

jk500029 Apr 2021, 09:52

The controls is not the best, and it's really difficult to find what shoots you. But okay the idea was good, and both the music and visuals is overall also pretty good.

OkayLobster30 Apr 2021, 06:38

The controls at the start were really difficult to control until I unlocked some of the upgrades. I really like the idea, it feels like a space rougue like game.

LTorresTailfer1 May 2021, 20:19

Very cool, reminds me of elite dangerous in many ways! A pilot, alone against the universe, braving untold dangers and unknowable cosmic horrors... I love it! You go guys!

pedrocoden3 May 2021, 11:19

congratulations! the game is very well done

LDJam user 2394904 May 2021, 01:58

I like the game overall. The first few times I started though I was killed instantly by an enemy behind me. It's a little difficult to fly with any precision, so getting the quarks can be really challenging.

Johannimations5 May 2021, 23:39

Don't know why, i seem to be the only one with this problem, but i couldn't open the game properly. A pitty as i would have wanted to rate it. Is the problem on my side or can you maybe fix it somehow? Really no idea what happened :(

Edit: maybe i should mention, that my computer is filled to the brim with stuff and i litteraly only have 50 MB storage space left. Maybe that could be the problem

Substain6 May 2021, 10:07

nice, although I feel like the movement is very slow (despite upgrades). For a jam game, it's nicely done!

fy09 May 2021, 09:55

Crashed after execute, without any output

MattWoelk9 May 2021, 20:45

Nice! Upgrades helped a lot. I felt more capable over time.

asfdfdfd9 May 2021, 21:21

This red ship is too powerful!

jitspoe16 May 2021, 10:18

Not sure why so many people were complaining about the ship being difficult to control. Seemed pretty straightforward to me. Hitting targets while moving, though, was pretty challenging (not that that's a bad thing). I found I had to pretty much sit still to hit stationary targets. Pretty enjoyable to play, though. Found it kind of funny when you could go faster than your lasers and run into them, causing them to flip around. :D

If you push this further, there are a few things that could be tweaked, especially with the visual language. There's a LOT of red. Red ships, red lasers, red Q's floating in space. I think level 5 or 6 is just all red, and it's difficult to tell what's going on. Also sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a distant eyeball and a star.

If you do an upgrade system for future jams, I've seen a few games have a shortcut to buy all the upgrades for people with limited time, which is a cool idea for games like this, so players that are struggling can skip the grind.

Made it to level 7 but did not complete it. Kept running into the time limit, which is rough when you're trying to kite that many enemies and stay alive.

LJFMX16 May 2021, 17:49

I think the flight controls were rather okay. I think they got a lot better once I actually unlocked the inertial dampeners. The game runs really great, being built Rust it has awesome performance. Sometimes when shooting things far away, it wouldn't register my lasers hitting it, that or I just have a very poor aim. All in all a very impressive submission.

Also for some reason I cant seem to figure out how to download the source code. On the Github release page, when I go to download the source code it just has a readme file.

Other games by @lpghatguy

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★3.17