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Out of Depth's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Style | #16 | 4.717 | 4.717 |
| Overall | #161 | 4.120 | 4.120 |
| Enjoyment | #355 | 3.873 | 3.873 |
| Creativity | #1033 | 3.771 | 3.771 |
Ranked from 205 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Our game explores deep sea gigantism and how deep sea marine life is at a bigger scale than that closer to the water surface. This theme is reinforced in the visuals of the game with the depth meter on the side.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for full credits
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Comments
Hey Daniel and team! Good to see you again! Congrats on submitting your game!
The art, music, world... overall presentation on this is fantastic. The light rays, small background fish, bubbles, coral growths - everything contributed to a visual feast that really stands out, especially in a game jam.
I love the loop of discovering new things and improving my exploration abilities. But this missed the mark for me just a bit. Some of the scans felt like they took just a bit too long, like the big jellyfish. I was just sitting there, not really doing anything for what felt like forever. The baseline movement was too slow and made my first run feel tedious, especially when I realized I had oxygen and had to slowly navigate my way back to the surface. And backtracking to the surface is what spoiled the experience for me, I think. Slow movement, no additional exploration, and the requirement to remember how I got around certain land formations made the second half of each dive feel like a waste of time. I saw there was an upgrade to increase return speed, but I think that's not really going to fix it either.
Games for a jam, like any game, can benefit from knowing the target audience. In this case, that's other jammers. And knowing that other jammers will probably want to rate a bunch of games and give a bunch of feedback means that time becomes a valuable resource. Spending mine to slowly return to the ship instead of getting to play the next segment of the game felt like a drag. Perhaps in a full release experience, this might be more tolerable. Or there would be more time to develop and make the return process more engaging. But that would require way more time than 96 hours affords, even with the broad team of talent you have with you.
I hope this doesn't come off as too harsh. I type out this much because I really liked what I saw. I want the makers of every game to value their experience making games, and be able to learn and grow from it! Please keep making games, especially if they're going to be as gorgeous and cool as this. And be okay with a slightly smaller scope - or in this case: scale ;)
Thank you so much for giving us such a deep dive into your review of our game! I do agree with you about the game loop taking a bit too long and we initially did intend for it to be possible to simply emergency escape to the surface (we even had the art assets ready for such a thing) but like you said, 96 hours is only so much time. By the time we got to the last couple of hours there wasn't really much of a way to get the feature in which to us was one of our big disappointments in our entire experience as a whole. A lot of the team was fresh this year, as Daniel might've mentioned earlier and since all of us are students there were some issues with keeping the entire team at a similar operating capacity throughout the jam. Moving forward next year we will likely be in a better position to use our time better. As the one largely coordinating the team, I'll be sure to improve my understanding of good team management as well as getting to know the ins and outs of my team to make next year an even better success for us.
Everyone on the team is always striving to learn and grow. Our hope is to keep doing this game development thing, not just again and again but also better and better!
Thank you so much! We look forward to coming back!
And perhaps we'll tone down the scale of the game too. By the time we figured out that we needed a gosh darn fish AI (even if it was decently simple) we knew we bit off more than we should've.
Managing a team is TOUGH. I've done it for a jam once, and that was unlike any other jam. Keep up the awesome work! And thanks for the thoughtful reply <3
Hey CFHM, thanks so much for the really detailed critique! I think this time around we had a bit too much of a focus on how the game looked in comparison to gameplay, I'm very grateful for the feedback on movement and exploration (this project was 100% overscoped and had to be reigned back towards the end lol). This was also the first jam for both artists so I wanted to ensure their abilities played in as much as possible as well.
Thank you again for the detailed review and good luck for the rest of the jam! It was great to hear from you again
I'm always so shocked when people manage to put together a full team for a jam (full-time jobs & life getting in the way)! It's so hard to get people to commit the time and not clash with each other. Super well done, the art is amazing and I can't believe there's even voice acting. Overall really enjoyable I hope you guys are proud cause its super good :D Would totally play a full game of this
We got lucky! The entire team is a group of high school and uni students so most of us were free all the way. Our musicians flight got delayed so he composed a lot of stuff while on his flight and I myself was travelling as well (my flight got delayed 3 hours the night before submission so that added quite a bit of stress in the last minute push).
Thank you so much for your kind words!
This reminds me of Dave the Diver. The gameplay loop is simple yet addictive. Farm, upgrade repeat. The simple stuff never fails!
Thank you so much for playing our game! I hoped to make as polished of a simple mechanic as our time allowed for in the jam so I love that other people believe in this philosophy too!
Nice relaxing gameplay, but becomes a slog quickly. The drawings are really pretty on their own, but lack clarity when moving around on a busy background, though maybe that intentional. I'm not sure how it fits into the theme of the jam, really.
Thank you for the comments! It's refreshing to hear some critiques now that the game has been out for long enough for people to really experience it. I do agree with you on the gameplay feeling slow and due to the shaders some of the interactables in game are just not clear enough. Hopefully we can acknowledge this and improve on it for next year with better communication between the art team and programming team. We did make some animations simplified as well but there were some clashes with colour and the background. Again, that's something for us to correct in our workflow and communication that we well address moving into next year!
We were trying to focus in on deep sea gigantism as the main part of our theme adherence, where you're a "little sub in a big ocean" which also happens to have some pretty big fish. We apologize if that didn't come through as much for you as we hoped.
Thank you for playing our game!
Pretty cool game, very impressive how much depth (haha) it has for a jam game, that said, it does suffer from really sluggish sub movement and long stretches of nothing, and that isn't helped by boss fish that can force you to go all the way back to the start and back down again if you get hit too bad. Also, after scanning the bobbit all my scans for that session had dissapeared and I got no money, which is a very unfortunate bug. That said, could absolutely see this being turned into a really great ocean-exploration game, it's definitely got all the framework there, great art, and pretty awesome sound design.
We're very sorry about that one particular bug. It's by no means game breaking but it is a huge pain and certainly doesn't help with enjoyment getting no reward for getting to the big boss. We should've caught it sooner but our testing might not have been rigorous enough for it unfortunately. We'll be sure to fix it and the other issues post-jam so that people can enjoy the game into the future too!
I love your team's art style, it's perfect for a cozy game like this <3 At least until I encountered the bobbit worm and got Subnautica flashbacks.. But in all seriousness, great game and super addicting progression!
Thank you so much! We were hoping to spook some people with that so we're glad we did with you!
the designs go hard so the cat gets a go on the dance floor too 👍
THANK YOU SO MUCH FLUFF!!!! I LOVE YOUR FANARTS AND ARTS IN GENERAL THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DRAWING A CHARACTER I LOVE SO MUCH!!!!!! AND THE LITTLE KATTER TOO?!?!!?!? WOW!!!! YAYYYY
love the additional leg tattoos you added too hehe
i know right??
wah hoo it was no prob, thank you very much as well for making her in the first place dawg 🤝 it was a pleasure to work with you x)
We love to see it!! It's always fantastic being friends with such fantastic artists like you! You're amazing!
😎
Oh my goodness this is amazing
thank you broski I tried
Wonderful work y'all! It's very impressive how much you were able to fit into this game, on top of some wonderful polish all around. I had a great time with this!
Thank you so much for looking at our game! I see that a lot of your team is reviewing ours so we'll be sure to check yours out too! Y'all are so cool.
It’s so nice to see your whole team here :))) Thank you so much for the support!
This game is 100% my favorite game I've played so far, the sea is such a fascinating place and I'm so happy you guys made a game exploring it! My only gripe is I think its bugged because i got back and it didn't register any of my scans or give me any money, but the game is so lovely and I love it!
Thank you so much for the kind words! Yeah that bug happens when you scan the Bobbit Worm. We didn't manage to catch it before releasing unfortunately :( If it isn't that though we'd love to hear what the issue was specifically so we can include it in our list of bugs at the bottom of our page!
OMHGGGGGG I I LOVE THE ART, THE GIRLTHE OLD MAN THE FISHH AAAAA SO GOOD
Thank you so much! The art team is very proud of themselves, especially after receiving so much praise from all you lovely reviewers!
Thank you so much lol, we hoped these characters would also help in making the game more memorable
Scope of this is impressive for 4 days! Good job!
Thank you for playing the game! We had a feeling we might've overscoped when we finished our brainstorming session on day one but we managed pull through in the end, albeit pulling back on some of the stuff we initially planned. We're glad it all worked out!
Love the art!! I’m amazed by how many polished assets the game has. Even voice acting?? Great game and it’s super fun to scan new fishies :)
We were on the art grind more than full time every day of the jam. If the artists demanded I paid them for their services you best bet I'd be broke immediately. I'm endlessly grateful to have such incredibly talented artists to work with!
It feels like i'm scamming this team by not paying for the game.
seriously, the quality of every aspect is top notch, for me specially the soundtrack.
Hahah of course not!! It means a lot to see people like the game, I know I feel plenty rewarded already :) I agree with you that our musicians are so talented and cool!!
Seeing comments like these are what motivate us the most! We're working to "go legit" with our studio and people like you are what help us feel like we'll really make it!
This amazing quality? You guys are serious? Better take all my money.
P.S. I kept playing it for 20 minutes. Can not stop myself.
AWW thank you!! I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the game :D
Extremely polished! What a huge content in the game. Good atmosphere. I love it!
Thank you so much, super happy you liked the content and atmosphere especially!
Insanely polished and content rich game for a mere 4 days very very impressed by this and I hope it finds it's way into the top 100 or the video. Great work team and love the music and voice work!
I'm grateful to the abilities of my teammates to make everything possible, thank you so much for the kind words and glad you had fun!
Why does it look so good! Only thing i can criticise is , that for me it was not completly clear how i have to scane the big "boss", it did not work , and than it worked, kind of weird.
Thank you! Figuring out the boss scanning was tricky since it was segmented and due to time constraints I eventually settled on making it so you only have to scan one of its segments to successfully scan it (though scanning the boss itself also seems to have created more issues).
Extremely polished game, I really love the character designs, thats real ART!
Koko had a great time designing Katherine and we had fun seeing the process and giving suggestions - creating these characters gave the game a lot of charm (At least I hope it does anyway). Thanks so much for playing, glad you enjoyed!
It is an amazing work for such a short period to make, good job guys. It is so complete, the atmosphere, the art, and even voice acting? That's an overkill for a game jam lol. I enjoy it a lot, please tell me if you made a full game of it.
Thank you so much, this was only possible because of great teammates (including someone to ensure that we weren't at each other's throats). We especially focused on polish and content this year, so happy to hear it paid off and glad you had a good time!
WHAT. You made this in 4 days..?
(I scanned a lobster and got fugue'd)
The exploration is so wonderful, aided by the amazing visuals and beautiful soundtrack. And you have GOOD voice acting too..? yada yada just put this on Steam or something lol
HAHA we were laughing about doing a blue lobster and a "le fishe au chocolat" for you to scan lol but of course it was low on priorities and it didn't make it sadly. Thank you so much for the kind words, our team used nearly all of the 96 hours and I skipped out on sleeping for two nights