I participated in the Ludum Dare 48 game jam, where the theme was Deeper and Deeper.
Having done all my previous game jams in a team, I decided to work solo on this one, giving me total creative freedom.
The idea that came to me after seeing the theme Deeper and Deeper was cave exploration. My design has the player holding a lantern, with it being their only source of light. The main objective is to keep the lantern burning by finding lamp oil, which has been scattered around each cave and forces the player to explore, with each new cave taking them deeper and deeper.
After some initial feedback, I added multiple difficulty modes, along with an endless mode that gives the player infinite lantern fuel.
I wanted to make each cave randomly generated, but this proved too big a task for the given time frame, so I instead opted to hand-build each cave varient, which allowed me to experiment with lots of visual humour and gags. I also had time to create a version with Ray tracing, which is what’s shown in the screenshots below:
The game ended up scoring 79th place on humour. I created all the assets, bar the music and the animated flame in the centre of the lantern, myself in the 48 hour time period, and the game can be viewed here.
