Sunken Shadows
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
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A cruel wizard must be defeated in the the deep depths of the sea. Travel though an abandoned underwater city made of randomly generated rooms and floors you have to travel down. Each floor contains dangerous aquatic creatures that you and your trusty knife must get through by slashing enemies and grappling around to avoid their attacks. At the bottom of each biome a fearsome creature will block your way that you must defeat. Should you fail, you'll possess a new vessel to try and try again.
ROGUELIKE
Explore procedurally generated dungeons full of hidden treasures, traps and puzzles. Made from hand-built rooms to ensure a fun playing experience and interesting discoveries.
UPGRADES
During your adventure through the Sunken Shadows, you will find many upgrades, some more rare than others. Each upgrade item gives you 3 choices of ability improvements, new abilities or new rules. Some will change how you approach the game entirely. And there are some upgrades that are really powerful, but come with a curse that you will need to work around to survive.
POTIONS & ITEMS
Find and buy consumable items like potions that will change the way your character or the enemies behave for a limited time. Use this advantage to get the upper hand in difficult encounters or boss fights. Want to have your crystals set enemies ablaze with magical fire? Slow down time to plan your actions strategically?
VISUALS
The graphic style is inspired by the PS1/ N64 era of games, so we use low poly are and pixel art textures. We combine them with modern effects like particles, shaders, dynamic lighting etc. to give the game a unique art style.
BIOMES
Explore lots of varied biomes with different enemies, traps, secrets and bosses to find. You start in the ruined city, journey onwards to the coral reef and to the Leviathan depths. As you get deeper, the environment and enemies will get progressively more corrupted.
ENEMIES AND TRAPS
Fight through hordes of enemies, each with their own strategies and weaknesses. Avoid tricky traps placed by the builders of the ruined ancient city you're exploring.
SHOPS
Your friendly skeleton shop keeper mysteriously is always one step ahead of you, and willing do take your hard earned gold in exchange for upgrades, health containers or potions that change the behavior of your knife or crystals for a limited time.
LEVEL EDITOR
Create your own challenges and custom rooms using the included level editor. Send us your coolest builds and we might feature them in a future update!
DETAILS
The game features a procedurally generated dungeon consisting of hand-built rooms and a level editor for making your own custom challenges.
The scope of the upcoming demo includes the first two biomes and bosses of the game. More will come in the full release.
More biomes, enemies and bosses are are being worked on, as well as more upgrades, shop items, secrets and mysterious puzzles.
CREDITS
Alghost (Programming, Game Design & VFX)
Mikoolec (Game Design, 2D/ 3D Art, Level Design)
October (Music and Sound Effects)
Eshera (Concept Art, 2D Art)
Alex (Programming, UI)
Mighty Tiny (3D Art)
Elementus (Sound Effects, Sound Programming)
JL (Programming)
Hemmo (Social Media, Marketing)
TinkerGolem (Game Design, 3D Art, Level Design)
jd brown (Sound Effects)
KNOWN BUGS
If you have issues with the performance, try setting the lighting quality to Low in the settings. We're working on shader caching and mesh optimization, so there will be less lag spikes in the game when enemies or projectiles are spawning.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- 32bit Spring Cleaning Jam 2024 UpdateMar 06, 2024
- First Post Jam UpdateSep 26, 2023
Comments
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Fun update! It feels better and more responsive than before, especially now that the grapple pull persists through contact with surfaces on the way. I think the movement also feels tighter, but that might just be me.
As for visual and audio, I like the addition of the arms to the screen; they help tie the screen together and make the game feel more complete. The new music is also excellent, catchy and interesting.
Very good stuff, thank you.
Thank you for playing post-update and your criticism! The movement speed got reduced, which might make it feel better. We have a Discord server if you'd like to stay updated on the game: https://discord.gg/BhDaMS5S9P
Running on linux here, I have a Lenovo thinkpad t420 (2011 era laptop), I had to tack on the command --rendering-driver opengl3 to get it to launch.
After launching the game and setting the lighting setting to low. When I get into the main room, looking in the corners of the room gets me 60fps locked, whereas looking at the well in the center of the room gives me 6 fps and the game becomes un-playable.
On initial glance I thought this might be a toaster friendly game, but as it turns out, it may not be.
I'd love to give this game another try when it has better performance : )
Thanks for the feedback!
We’re working improving the performance of the game on lower end machines.
We’ve got a new update going out in the next couple of days that should improve the performance a bit already.
The mouse sensitivity is so slow with no way of improving it why is there no sensitivity slider anywhere. Seriously why is it so low, my aiming is intolerably slow.
The combat I foudn consisted for walking up to an enemy and slashing them and then walking backwards to avoid them, which is weirdly stiff.
Also, my hitbox for collecting items is small that it's super eay to just miss collecting them and I'm not sure why the character was coded this way.
I can see the effort here. The knife mechanics are really cool, the music is a pure bop, and the art is like PS1 minecraft and I like it. But it felt horrendous to control and I didn't see much enjoyment in the core gameplay (despite how fun it was to spiderman across the ceiling), so I DNF'd. Sorry devs
But seriously, huge potential here.
Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I’ll add a mouse sensitivity slider to the settings. Currently it probably depends on your mouse DPI, and mine is set quite high.
The item pickup issue has been addressed already and will be fixed in the next patch as well.
We’ll look into your comments on the combat, although that will probably take a bit longer to adjust.
The level design and art are really, really good
Great job on the game, I had a lot of fun with it. I'm glad to see that you plan on updating it soon and I'm excited to see what's coming next, it's a very strong start.
My only recommendations for improvements in the base gameplay would be faster enemy attacks, especially the boss, and maybe making things a bit faster in general if possible. While the movement is good and pretty fast once you get going, combat itself is in a weird place when it comes to speed. Other than that, maybe making just crabs drop health to be a bit more thematic, but I don't know how that'd be received. I was also thinking that maybe the crystal could have another use, such as being a bomb when it expires.
Not many issues were presented during gameplay. Pulling with the grapple is a little funky; when you're standing, you seem to want to go upwards rather than forwards, but it's fine when done in the air. Pulling is also interrupted sometimes when side-bumping things, but I don't know if that's intentional or not, similarly to spikes being triggered by coins, gems and health and enemies often dying to traps. Barring those, I got stuck on a pot, once.
Didn't have any performance issues, myself, but I've got a pretty good setup so it could just be me. I keep it at 60 FPS and it stays there no matter what.
Thanks for the game! I'm pretty hopeful for its future.
(i will reply to this comment in chunks)
We do plan on giving crystals more usage, by adding consumables that you can use to give crystals properties like explosions for some time.
Grapple stopping pulling when you touch a wall or floor is a bug, to be fixed
About enemies, we hope the combat gets more interesting when we add more enemies. Enemies dying from traps has a side effect of balancing some rooms, where there would normally be too many enemies to deal with by hand. Traps getting set off by crystals can be used strategically to kill something without getting close, and to watch out where you throw your stuff as not to jump straight into spikes.
The boss was a last day addition, it will get reworked mostly into a faster, more balanced and harder to cheese fight.
Thank you for the reply. The consumables for the crystal sound like quite a satisfying approach for more utility, the traps explanation makes sense and I'm glad that the grapple stopping will be fixed and that the boss will be updated. Staying tuned, I'm looking forward to playing more.
the vases can now be broken!
no more getting stuck
I like the artistic decision but it has a lot of performance issues, I have an RTX 2080 ti and it hits me very big fps drops
Thanks for playing our game! We’re currently working on optimizing it. A new build that should help a little will come out later today.
New build out now, we managed to improve the performance a bit and applied some polish to many areas of the game. Hope you like it!
AMAZING!! It keeps going at low fps but it doesn't have as many stops as before, honestly it's a good game and with a little work something great could come out
I've tested it and it seems that FPS drops only occur when using the Itch launcher. I typically play outside of it and had nothing, but had some drops as soon as I decided to use the launcher.