Too Deep
Submission for the Game Dev TV 2021 Game Jam.
Urist the dwarf's greed may get the best of him as he struggles to collect gold and escape from the Hellspawn he unleashed deep beneath the mountain.
| Controls | Keyboard | Controller |
| Start | Any | Start |
| Move | A/D or Left/Right Arrow | Left Stick or Dpad Left/Right |
| Jump | Space or X | A |
| Dash | Shift | B or Right Trigger |
| Slide/Pogo | S or Down Arrow | Left Stick or Dpad Down |
| Drop through platform | S or Down Arrow + Space or X | Left Stick or Dpad Down + A |
| Discard Coin | Q | X |
| Restart Level | R | Select |
Credits
Programming: Craig Holman (Bluspur)
Game Design: Jacob Eisele (Eyeslee)
Art: Patrick Steppan (patrickpatrick)
Download
Development log
- 1.01 UpdateJun 07, 2021
Comments
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I really like the art style of this game. Super solid and nice retro feel. I also like the little tutorial messages you've sprinkled throughout the level in the background. That's a really cohesive way to implement them. I suck at platformers so I didn't get very far but the controls seemed solid. No crazy slipping and sliding like you get in some platformer games. I didn't hear any audio? That would be a nice touch to add. Other than that, nice work!
Thanks for the feedback, we're glad the game at least felt good to play! Sorry if it was too difficult, we're looking into adding options for that in the future. No audio yet, but hopefully coming soon!
I got stuck on the beginning long slide in the level just after unlocking dash? But then I realized you have to keep down held in to maintain the momentum. Whoopsie.
And then I got stuck on the level after the tutorial on how to press down to go through the thin ledges? In the level after the ledge tutorial, you have to go through a down ledge, but I sort of ran past the tutorial message in the last level and just pressing "down" wasn't working.
After an embarrassingly long time, and some generous buttonsmashing, I realized you have to press down and jump at the same time to go through a ledge, but having a tutorial message at the first ledge you have to go through to progress in addition to the one you can easily run past is maybe a good idea, especially with no level select.
Other than that, a neat little game! I like the dwarf fortress references, which is basically just the name, dwarf and digging too deep, but I still like it. :P
One thing I will note is at no point did it seem needed for me to discard coins, but I did sometimes need to bypass picking up coins because of the wall moving in. So maybe if I had discarded coins, the wall would have been slow enough for me to pick up coins? Seems kind of silly, so I just keep the ones I have.
p.s. You "hoard" coins, not "horde" ;)
p.p.s Sometimes my double jump doesn't seem to register. Somewhat annoying to fall into lava when I clearly did press the double jump.
p.p.s Sometimes white vertical lines will flash on the screen? No idea why? Might be a browser play issue maybe? Playing in chrome.
p.p.p.s A fun little game!
p.p.p.p.s If I restart the page after completing the game, I can't play again? Not sure if I broke something by not restarting from the game end screen and deciding to refresh for some reason. (My mind works in mysterious ways.) Will just download if I really feel like playing again I guess.Thanks for all the feedback, it's great to get this much in one comment! Holding down in the air to maintain momentum is NOT intuitive, but it's something we sadly couldn't fix in time for the two weeks we had for the game jam (which is going to be a running theme for this response.)
More tutorial messages is definitely something we'll note for future reference. It's hard to tell how much is too much with something like this, especially since the player doesn't always want to stop and read everything with a big purple wall behind them. You're right though, we should have had a message for that second platform fall. Sorry for any frustration it caused!
It is possible to escape while holding every coin in the game (I had to do it way too many times before uploading it) so discarding coins was viewed as more of a "choose your own difficulty" kind of mechanic. If you were struggling to make it past a certain screen, you could always just throw away what you had to get through it.
P.S. All spelling errors are the fault of @patrickpatrick, I take no responsibility.
P.P.S. Yeah, the failed double jump seems to happen when the player jumps too close to the edge, so it registers that you jumped while in the air. We're tentatively planning on doing some updates after the game jam's voting period is over since only hotfixes are allowed at this time. One of those changes will probably be adding some "grace period" right after the player runs off the edge, but we'll see.
I've also seen the flashing lines sometimes in recent playthroughs, hopefully we can get a fix for it.
P.P.P.S. We're glad you enjoyed it!
P.P.P.P.S. Weird, not entirely sure why that happens. Might be an itch.io problem, might be an us problem, might be a you problem. Might be all of the above.
Thanks again for the detailed comment, it means a lot to us.
Thanks for the detailed response. I'm glad to report the game seems to be working again, so no idea what went wrong there. *shrug* My best guess is some sort of browser hiccup.
People who actually go for all the coins must be mad though. Mad!