Riches From Below

by negdo
Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.14
Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.91
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.67
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.78
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.53
Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.75
Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.78

Riches From Below is a diver management game. Maneuver your boat, deploy divers, uncover treasure, buy upgrades, and work your way out of debt.





How to play


- move boat with WASD
- deploy diver with SPACE
- pick up diver with E

Send your divers into the sea — they'll search far and wide for the hidden treasure.
When you retrieve them, they’ll mark your map with a white line showing how close they got to a treasure.

At day’s end, visit the shop to stock up on upgrades and prepare for the next dive.

*P.S. Shark doesn't bite*

Frame 17 (1).png

Credits

- negdo: 3D Art, Animation, UI design
- PickyDogFish: Programming, Game Design
- TheRedDevil: Programming
- grizeldi: Programming, VFX

Comments33

gamesplusjames
gamesplusjames8 Apr 2025, 00:29
Beautiful graphics and a fun little game! Great work all round!
Sharky3188
Sharky31888 Apr 2025, 00:52
Awesome entry! The visuals are great, really nice aesthetic, very dredge like vibes. Really fun take on the theme.
All the little details are really well made, like how each diver jumps out the boat. Great clean UI really nice to see.
Hilarious you can actually kill the divers, didn't expect it the first time around and gave me a good chuckle, the hull 'thunk' is both satisfying and hilarious.
Searching for treasure with the divers is really clever, a fun balance of trying to drop off as many as possible while also keeping them all alive.
Overall a really great job.
Urosh8 Apr 2025, 15:11
Very nice graphics, I love all the models, and the vibe of the seagulls and the engine, only thing thats missing is a nice theme song! Cool and unique concept, we made a game where you and your friends are the divers that compete for treasure, and I like your idea of you being just a crew boss that doesn't actually do anything risky, you just drop them, wait and ~~run them over~~ pick them back up! I don't know if its just me being bad but I felt like it took waay to long to pick up the divers, maybe instantly picking them up with faster drown speed would be better, but thats just my opinion. Anyways great game, hope you find somebody to do the soundtrack!
Flokami
Flokami8 Apr 2025, 17:43
Nice ambiance and pretty unique but waiting for the divers can become a bit boring (maybe it's my ADHD xD)
no_firing
no_firing8 Apr 2025, 18:10
I follow for project since start the jam. Game so cool!
Anhell068 Apr 2025, 20:00
Очень прикольная игры, мне нравится графика
pidifussel8 Apr 2025, 20:04
Sadly could not pick my divers up again and my boat was moving on its own. Still like the visuals and the sounds in this
Pikario
Pikario8 Apr 2025, 20:37
Very cool visuals! I liked the idea but it was hard to save all the divers when deploying the four, I end up using only two or three. But nice entry!
Leophyte
Leophyte8 Apr 2025, 21:24
I killed 3/4 divers in the first minute... I swear it was an accident

Best looking game so far for me! I didn't quite get how to know precisely where the treasures are in the white areas (unless that's just part of the game to search randomly in them?), but the divers come back pretty fast so it's not that big of an issue
oxnh
oxnh8 Apr 2025, 21:24
Damn WASD wasn't working for me on linux
grizeldi
grizeldi8 Apr 2025, 21:40
Thanks for the kind words everyone!

@leophyte The idea with circles is that if the circle has a white border, then the treasure is somewhere along that border, but not inside the circle. If the circle has no border, then it means there is no treasure in that area. So with some strategically placed divers, you can pretty easily figure out where white circles intersect. We are aware however that the tutorial doesn't explain this mechanic well, but we didn't really have any good ideas on how to better explain it.

@oxnh Darn, that's sad to hear. To be sure, I re-tested our Linux build on my Ubuntu machine and it seems to work fine. Are you maybe using some DE/WM that maybe has got some issues with window focus management? Do other fullscreen Unity based games work fine for you?
oxnh
oxnh8 Apr 2025, 21:48
@grizeldi yeah other games seem to work fine. I am using an odd window manager though. I'll try again and make sure it's focused properly
oxnh
oxnh8 Apr 2025, 21:50
@grizeldi I tried again. It's really weird the buttons to interact with the UI work, just game controls don't work for me. That's a shame. Atleast I can rate you highly on visuals (dw I didn't rate the other categories).
grizeldi
grizeldi8 Apr 2025, 21:54
@oxnh Huh, that's really weird. I got no idea what could be causing that, probably some Unity weirdness. Thanks for testing though 😃
Indiealesha
Indiealesha9 Apr 2025, 06:59
Great job! Reminds me of the mobile game Fish Idle.
JHax
JHax9 Apr 2025, 14:12
The graphics are really lovely! It's refreshing to have a "Depths" game to have a slightly softer and brighter colour palette and the 3D models are really nicely done. The treasure finding mechanics are interesting to get into, took me a while (and a reread of the game description) to figure out what information the circles were giving me and really got underway once I'd grasped that! I liked that the diving didn't give you like an exact location for nearby treasure and you have to like triangulate a bit.
Lazar Cvetkovic9 Apr 2025, 16:56
The visuals are stunning! The game feels really polished and has a lovely vibe. :)

I'd appreaciate an options menu for restarting the game when I accidentally kill the drivers :D
TheRedDevil
TheRedDevil9 Apr 2025, 19:53
@lazar-cvetkovic Hey, thanks for the feedback. If you start the next day, your divers respawn, you should also get a popup that tells you to go to the shop and start a new day if you kill all of the divers 😄
David05
David059 Apr 2025, 22:39
Really good game, super fun and amazing graphics.

Accidentally killing a diver for the first time is extremely funny but I think you should maybe explain that they respawn.

I personally found that the upgrade system didn't give much benefits compared to the cost of each item so on about day 3 I just stopped upgrading and focused on saving case.

On day 7 I found treasure that took me from a little under 3000 to a little over 9000. That genuinely shocked me and made me laugh a little because I did not expect to find treasure that would pay off my whole debt in one go.

Genuinely impressive that this was made in just 3 days tho good job :)
Norah
Norah9 Apr 2025, 23:59
I really liked your game ! It was both cute and shocking, I killed 3 divers on my first day ... 😢
I loved the animations and visuals too, it reminds me of "Dredge" 🐟
HelloImBenjamin
HelloImBenjamin10 Apr 2025, 05:55
The game felt so polished and pleasant to play. Everything from the art to the overall vibe was just spot on. Great job!
OlenIkimid
OlenIkimid10 Apr 2025, 08:34
Sometimes I don't always enjoy trying out people's games on Ludum Dare because...well...they're jam games and people are trying their best in a very short time frame and sometimes you're left with stuff that isn't...so nice play 😅. But this was really fun to playtest! Ambience is captured very nicely. It's great that you can just keep playing and spending your money to trick out the boat so it turns into a meme machine that flies across the map in a second and can turn on a dime XD

Only equipment I wish I could buy is some helmets so my divers can tank a bonk to the head from my rocketship boat. Totally unnecessary and difficult to do in the jam timeframe, but it would also be a nice visual feature if every upgrade you bought was shown on the boat.

Although it's probably not designed with multiplayer in mind, I could easily see this as being a fun little local multiplayer game to play with friends at a lan party :)
PickyDogFish
PickyDogFish10 Apr 2025, 09:46
@olenikimid thanks for the kind words.Thats a great idea for an upgrade, it would definitely be a nice addition, as it is pretty hard not to run over the divers.

And about adding visuals to the ship - we thought about it, negdo even made some 3d models, but there wasn't enough time to add it into the game.
0X_VOID_X0
0X_VOID_X011 Apr 2025, 08:50
This was a lot of fun, the graphics set the mood really well and the gameplay is simple but addictive. I found myself playing for quite a while. The upgrades actually make a difference rather than just being there for display's sake.

Nice work!

A moment of silence for all the divers that died of natural cause.
Braeden11 Apr 2025, 18:12
Crazy that you guys did all this within the time of the jam. Wasn't expecting a shop with upgrades and everything.
Long term I think you'd need to expand on weather conditions are other things to make the game more difficult, the loop got pretty stale by the third day, especially with some upgrades under your belt.
That being said I had a lot of fun with this, and I audibly gasped the first time I ran over a diver 😆
Momo_Hunter
Momo_Hunter11 Apr 2025, 19:13
Had a lot of fun with this entry. Would have loved to have more than 4 divers and to choose an upgrade I've seen before, because I wanted the speed update once I had enough money but it didn't appear again :( Nonetheless very nice entry with great visuals and a really clean UI, well done!
PretendCoding12 Apr 2025, 21:24
Very polished in pretty much every aspect. It's a bit too easy to squish your divers, but other than that, this was a very good game!
Jag
Jag13 Apr 2025, 02:48
A very very polished game! I'm impressed by all that was achieved in just 3 days! This feels like it's ready to be shipped. I wish it wasn't possible to squish your drivers, and that controlling the boat was a bit quicker and snappier. Other than that, what a great entry! Thank you for the game.
jacobingalls
jacobingalls13 Apr 2025, 04:43
> The American Dream

I really enjoyed it. Though I may have learned I would not make a good captain... suffice it to say the score summary should show diver deaths ☠ . I liked the day/night system and how that put added pressure at the end. One issue I had is that I added too many rudders and it became too responsive... but in a fun way I guess.
grizeldi
grizeldi13 Apr 2025, 12:44
@momo-hunter the upgrade that would allow for more divers was actually the first one we worked on, but it turned out that replacing the whole boat 3D model to allow for more passenger space broke too many things, so we ended up having to cut that upgrade as we were running out of time 😭

@jacobingalls If I remember correctly, some of the upgrades were intentionally a bit overtuned, so it feels less of a "I can't even tell the difference" and more of a "oh shit, this is almost too much". Regarding the win screen stats, a lot more stats were planned there, but the win screen was added last minute as we completely forgot about it and almost shipped without one 😅
JohnCoffee13 Apr 2025, 18:05
Beautiful graphics but buggy as hell if you do not have 1080p resolution. first started on my 32:9 screen, menu didnt work, on 1440p wide it sometimes went all blue from the water, but inbetween it was a lot of fun. kind of feel like i didnt get a part of the game because coin progress was really slow.
Shasaur
Shasaur23 Apr 2025, 21:17
Very nice low poly stylised art style, love it! Also a very fun and unique mechanic, nice to see something different from all the cave games :) Just a small think, and maybe I missed it, but would be nice to click to re-show the tutorial to remind myself :)

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