Dungeon Diver came 19th out of 192 entries in the Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to play our game, and especially for those who gave us some feedback on how to improve it.

Here are a list of the areas we tweaked for our post-jam update:

Flares & Oxygen

Flares seemed like such a good idea, just like torches in Legend of Grimrock. Let's make them even better by letting users stack them. But to make the game more realistic, we'll make it go completely dark when the flares run out - that will be fun. And, to stick with the game jam theme of duality, let's have a parallel mechanic of oxygen that depletes when you're underwater. We were very wrong...

Post jam we prevented flares from stacking and made it clear when the flare was in use by adding an animation to the icon when it was lit and changing the color of the text from white (100%), to yellow (>0% and < 100%) then red (0%). We also upped the duration of the flares from 5 minutes to 10 minutes.

To fix the problem of people accidentally dropping them in the dark, we added some emissive text to the side so you could still see it:

To fix the problem of not knowing when your oxygen was running out while free-looking, we now keep the Oxygen Gauge visible at all times while underwater. We also moved it to the top left, ready to have an option for on-screen controls on the bottom right:

However, after we did our post jam update, we got our first bit of feedback from a judge, and veteran in the industry, Joseph B. Hewett IV (of Eye of The Beholder fame and others). He was not happy with the flare mechanic, or the oxygen mechanic. And he was right, we were just trying to patch what was essentially a broken game mechanic. Going forward we're going to ditch the flares altogether, and the oxygen tank will be something you equip but doesn't run out of oxygen. And this is why doing game jams, and getting feedback, is great for improving your game dev skills.

Save Checkpoints

We spent almost an entire jam day getting the Load/Save mechanic to work and after that we thought we were OK to make a large map since people could save their progress. What we missed was automatic save checkpoints. In hindsight this would have been really easy to add in and we can't believe we missed it. Sorry to all those who didn't spot the Load/Save in the menus:

Even though we spent a long time on load/save we introduced a bug with enemies blocking the cell they were in after they died when you reloaded the game. It was a last minute "enhancement" to make them disappear when dead and the change had subtle implications for reloading games that we missed in testing. This was the first thing we fixed for the post-jam release.

Save checkpoints are in the post-jam update and we also added a message and sound effect so it's clear the game just saved.

Controls

We put the controls on the itch.io page but … no-one ever reads them (we don't either). In-game, we needed to explain the free-look controls, or how to use PgUp/PgDn to go up and down. Game Dev 101 - teach the player the controls in the intro area, ideally while not in combat or in peril of drowning! Thanks for your feedback on this:

We have added a Controls button to the start menu, and the pause menu, and also it's the very first note you can see straight in front of you when you fall off the ladder, you just hover your mouse over it to see it (you don't even need to click on it any more).

You can now completely control your movement with the mouse, and not use the keyboard at all. You can now use the mouse wheel to go forward and backwards, relative to the direction of free-look. We didn't put this on the image though as it requires a bit of dexterity to use the mouse wheel while also holding down the right mouse button.

For those who only like to use their keyboard, and not the mouse at all, you can now activate the quick slots (weapons, keys, medi-packs, etc.) by holding down the keys 1-4 on your keyboard. Also, keys R and F can be used to go up and down for those who couldn't get PgUp/PgDn to work, or have a small factor keyboard where those keys aren't there or require an extra Fn key to be held to activate them.

It turns out Apple Macs don't have a right mouse button by default. We added support for the standard workaround which is to CTRL-Left Mouse Button (or CTRL-Mouse Button in Mac-land).

We now only queue a single movement key if pressed while moving, not multiple.

We made the Inventory Tab larger and made it pulsate and animate in and out when you have an item in your hand so it was more obvious that you should click on it to get up the inventory:

Sound

We ran out of time at the end of the jam to add all the sound effects we had planned (most were in the project, just not wired up!). Your reviews brought this home clearly to us:

We listened to all your feedback and here are some of the extra sound effects we added in:

We also added in some music elements when save checkpoints (also added post-jam) are encountered and some of them have their own dedicated music sample. 

There are now breathing noises and drowning noises. You gasp for air when you come out of the water if you had to hold your breath at all. There are splash noises as you dive into and climb out of the water too.

There are wooden footsteps when you climb ladders (above water).

The enemies all make noises when they move, turn, attack and die.

Narrative

We put some narrative on the itch.io page but... no-one ever reads it (we don't either). Here is some feedback we got:

So we moved the intro message from the itch.io page onto an intro screen that is written over the top of a Bing Create AI generated image:

We also added an outro message but to save spoilers, here is just the image without the text:

The Uncle Dan in question, is of course, the leader of the jam, @Zooperdan, and his portrait is the collectable trophy that is hidden in 12 locations in the game. There are various notes scattered around the dungeon which all mention Dan too.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading our post-jam update devlog and thanks for helping us "up our game". We've learned a lot about game development during these past few weeks and now we think we're ready to give it a go commercially. Our plan is to release an enhanced version of this game on Steam at some point in the near future. Watch this space...