Diver 2.0: Electric Boogaloo
In the long forgotten past age that the natives called "2009", I began work on a game called "Diver". The concept was quite simple: you're a
diver who collects gold underwater and brings it back up to the surface, but the more gold you have the more weighed down you are and the harder it is to do that without drowning. The concept expanded quite naturally to include RPG elements such as stats and purchasable items to make your diving easier, and before I knew it I had a fairly solid, substantial piece of game on my hands. But I never released it.
This was for a few reasons: one, I never could get it polished or fully featured to my satisfaction; two, that "satisfaction" outstripped my actual ability at the time; and three, the code got really really messy as the game grew bigger and bigger. Seriously, it was disgusting.
But always wanted to return to the idea, and a few months ago I finally did. I started a new GM file, using only a few of the old art assets. I radically reworked the control scheme to use a more intuitive, modern mouse-following movement scheme than the previous arrow key one
1.
I'm a much better programmer than I was four years ago, and the code reflects that. So far the project has been going swimmingly (I've released three previous demos on Facebook) and I should be looking to include everything from gold magnets and harpoons to a level editor. But there's still much work to be done.
To that end, I'd like y'all's suggestions and feedback on what I've got so far. You guys are mostly game developers/ex-game developers like me, so I'm sure you've got some really valuable input.
The to-do featurelist is currently looking a little like this:
- Purchasable harpoon gun for killing sharks
- Environment events (like sharks becoming more blood-thirsty and agile for periods of time – think the Blood Moon in
Terraria)
- Achievements (maybe)
- More levels with different layouts
- Profiles and some kind of proper saving scheme
- Player usable level editor (seeing as I wrote one for myself to use I may as well include it)
1 – Which was really only there because I never put any real thought into how the motion should work and just went with the default thing that every other game ever has done.So anyway, here's the demo:
on 64D and
on GDrive.
Dive for gold!
Hide in caves!
Get blown up by mines!
Die tragically!Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing!
Pretty fun to play, got decently far in this, but it was really hard to tell what was going on at first. Things like rocket fuel and strength should be more obvious. Otherwise this would be a cool concept on a phone.
Hey thanks, Ferret!
A trailer that needs to be made:
If I dive for you, you give me the time and the place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm dead, no matter what. I don't sit in while you're purchasing upgrades, I don't carry a harpoon… I dive.Okay, to be honest, this reminds me of the Quantum Conundrum in that the death quotes are funnier than the game itself. That's not say the game isn't fun, it's just rather simple and too random. And I'm not saying the graphics are bad… but really, you should spend more time on text-based games, maybe? :)