Decender of the Deep

by remco

co-authored: @botch-frivarg

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.40

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.20

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.48

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.62

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.98

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.00

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.46

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.90

Decender of the Deep

Can you find an emerald, and get back to the surface with 'hands' to spare and a bunch of points?

Try building a mine out of cards! Move the character around, select a card, and bam -- there's a ladder to climb on, a torch to light your way -- or a new hole to climb through.

Beware of the earthquakes though! A new turn starts with a rumble, every 3 cards played! You'll survive the impact,, but the ground around you might be rearranged.

(Note: Th blue 'diamond' pickups 'just' give extra points. You need a green emerald and return it to the surface to win.)

Tags: #no ai

Genres: strategy

Comments19

jester14548 Apr 2025, 16:10

interesting concept of a card game about digging, I'm hooked! I scored a maximum of 13 thousand points. At first I didn't fully understand the rules, but then I understood the cyclical nature of the move and the issuance of cards, I liked it, cool!

LDJam user 2828708 Apr 2025, 18:10

I really liked the game. You took a simple card game and mad it about digging. It was really good. The music was good, sound effects.

I like the little earth quake every once in awhile.

The best thing was the ability to end the turn early and reshuffle the available tools.

You have the start of a really nice game.

Wolfier8 Apr 2025, 18:27

It is a decent idea. I think it would be nice to know what the earthquakes actually do. Sometimes they open up the floor and sometimes they close previous spaces and sometimes they do nothing at all. It's difficult to know how to play with them when they're not really consistent.

Stronf8 Apr 2025, 18:29

neat game, i enjoyed it
was not clear at start, but it was quite intuitive and clear, managed to beat the game with 5 turns to go
liked the unpredicatable nature of earthquakes, even though only understood that when i almost reached the green emerald

Keely-Brown9 Apr 2025, 15:55

The mechanics are pretty neat. I think there's some neat interactions with the movement being independent of the deck in terms of the timing. Mechanically I feel like there's a lot of neat stuff you could do with this as a base. Some of the onboarding was a little tricky to understand. It took some experimenting to get a hold of what was happening with the exclamation marks and how the flow of the game worked. But once it clicked - I had a pretty solid time trying to achieve the goal.

Transkuja9 Apr 2025, 19:07

I had a hard time understanding what was going on, but hey, got my emerald and managed to ran away :sunglasses:

LDJam user 1792989 Apr 2025, 20:09

I'm not sure I get the mechanics of the game, I just dug straight down to the emerald. I think it has great potential though.

Remcoauthor11 Apr 2025, 10:12

@vladimperator thanks!

> I just dug straight down to the emerald.

You have to get back to the surface (within the turn limit) to win though. (If you can also succeed at that: The main challenge is to get the point total up while doing that, by also collecting the diamonds.)

DevilXrom11 Apr 2025, 10:32

Interesting idea with cards and digging. Didn’t get it right away, but then it clicked. The earthquakes were a bit unexpected but made things more fun. Managed to grab the emerald and escape — had a good time!

K48UTO11 Apr 2025, 12:48

interesting combination of genres. mined diamonds, but then lost for unknown reasons, I'm sure I wasn't standing on the red cell.

Remcoauthor11 Apr 2025, 14:37

@k48uto There's a turn-limit '# hands before game-over' that shows in the lower left corner -- it'll turn red if below 5 turns and scale up if below 3. Maybe that's what happened?

(_Edit_: Also, you'll survive the red cells -- it's just the spots where there might be cave-ins of various sorts, closing and opening up some spaces -- sometimes with 'undiggable' spots. In order to make that work it never quite happens if you're also standing there.)

Eugenik14 Apr 2025, 03:06

In love with the atmosphere too! Good job :D.

YT-TY14 Apr 2025, 13:54

This is highly thematic and innovative in its gameplay.

Thorne Lee15 Apr 2025, 03:06

I love this type

LDJam user 24319315 Apr 2025, 07:43

Interesting combo of digging and deckbuilding game. I'm glad the earthquake didn't bury me alive allowing me to resume my progress. Speaking of which, my run was messy but despite of that, I've managed to find the green emerald and brought it to the surface.

Pegasus15 Apr 2025, 14:58

This is a cool use of a 'deck' type game. Everything about the game felt snappy and satisfying. My only critique was that I didn't really feel like I was ever in danger but perfectly tweaking difficulty in a jam is near impossible and better to be winnable than impossible. Really good entry guys

I_POTS17 Apr 2025, 11:23

Cute game! I like this gameplay!

JAMESDEV19 Apr 2025, 22:49

Super interesting concept! The scaling was off when I maximized the window but apart from that the game felt snappy!

Joror23 Apr 2025, 21:38

Neat lil mining game! The cards were pretty clear with their intent, but the exclamation marks were a bit harder to understand, since they don't hurt; I guess they're there to make it harder to get up? The lighting works as a nice visual effect. :fire:
I kind of expected a bit more pressure, or some additional card drafting / rotation going on.
Music is grindy an mining appropriate!

Other games by @remco

★3.37

★3.15

The Spacetime Contraption

★3.54

LD51

co-authored