Sinking Town by detectiveLosos



!ATTENTION! If you don’t want to suffer through tons of misspelled dialog lines, please consider playing the post-jam version. It fixes tons of writing mistakes We made in the last hours hurry and makes some of the quests a little bit more obvious. !ATTENTION!
Sinking Town is an adventure game where you play as robot fella by the name of Cranky Burns, who tries to save his robotown from sinking and rusting underwater. In this game you trade your robotic bodyparts with other robots, and for the robots their life is in their parts.
Controls: - Press "Q" to switch between your body parts and items. - Press "E" to use an active body part for interaction. - During dialog you can skip lines and pick answers by pressing "E". - During dialog switch between answers using "W" and "S". - Press "SPACE" to jump. - WASD - to move around. - Hold LMB to rotate the camera. - Mouse wheel - zoom in\out.
Team: - Leonid Dudakov (https://twitter.com/DetectiveLosos) - art, vfx, programming - Annie Owl (https://twitter.com/owlannie) - programming, story - Natalia Volkova (https://twitter.com/Natashius) - art, level design - Problemke (https://twitter.com/morel8ight) - music
Tools: - Unity 2019 - Blender - Aseprite - LMMS
| Windows | https://dashingashes.itch.io/sinking-town |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/sinking-town |
Ratings
| Given | 56🗳️ | 57🗨️ |

The original JAM version doesn't have the blank screen problem so I played that. Really digging the art style. I got stuck trying to find the lens for the factory door, but overall a really neat game and interesting take on the theme.
We have fixed the problem. Errors with post-processing. Thanks again for your feedback.
@neverautomatic Thanks alot for the info, you saved us a lot of time!
Well done!
Great job you guys!
I really enjoyed the level design and overall aesthetics of this game! The town feels very believable and is a lot of fun to explore. And the characters are very charming as well. Good job!
In JAM version, you need to grab some more coal from the factory roof, then go to drowning robot, exchange your nuclear engine with him, and give him coal to make the diamond.
In POSTJAM version, you have some coal left in your inventory after fueling up drowning robot, so you can just exchange your engine with him and make a diamond out of coal leftovers.
You can then use this diamond as a new lens crystal.
But you haven't missed much actually, because we had no time for a "Big ending" we planned at first. You will just get a "Thank You Screen" if you manage to bring the turbine to the factory.
@sempiternal Thanks! We glad you liked it :slight_smile:
@mharring Yeah, we wanted to make way more interactions, but our working process was a mess this time around, and we have managed to make very little of what was planned at the start. Maybe we should set less ambitious goals next time :smile:
@josia-roncancio Thank you! Sorry for the inconveniences, we were so tired that we haven't even checked the "fixed" version when uploaded it.
Great work!
Otherwise, fantastic entry!
Yeah, that factory door thing is very unclear. Pretty much nobody gives you hints that you can go take another lump of coal and compress it into a diamond. We added some dialogs to make it more clear in the post-jam version and we also made it so the coal is not removed from your inventory when you refuel the sinking robot. So people would more likely just stumble upon the right solution by combining everything with everything.
Thank you very much for playing!
@khamekaze We are very glad that you enjoyed our game. As far as expanding it into a bigger project, we have this idea pretty much after every jam, but life, study and dayjobs are always getting in a way. So we'll probably just call it a day and move on to creating more small game prototypes.
@darylsteak Thank you for playing our game! Yeah, this coal-diamond part is unclear, with it we are breaking the rules of the adventure-game-logic making you return and take an already used and forgotten item and use it once again for something else. In the post-jam version however we fixed this issue by adding more dialog hints and by not removing coal from your inventory after the first use.
I also like how the game encourages you to walk around and explore and talk to the other robots to figure out what's going on and what needs doing.
I think a nice addition would be a color change to the dialogue boxes, so you can easily tell who's speaking :)
Very nice work, very polished and well-made for such a short span of time. Congrats!
Overall a very impressive game, very complete and awesome looking.
Well done!
@drauthius Thanks! Yeah, the quest came out "a little bit" confusing and unclear.
@tiagorrech Thank you! Yes, i was actually thinking about coloring NPC dialog boxes, but ran out of time.
@drtizzle Thank you! Yes, unfortunately, we had no time to playtest the level, so stairs came out a little bit too narrow. I hope we find some time in the near future to fix this.
@j-c-one-bit-studio Thank you!
- I enjoyed the Dialog a lot, great to see games with a bit more script!
- The graphics, like I already mention, are just top tier.
- Innovative camera system, I liked how it cuts into houses.
This is one of those entries that makes me go "Oh I would love to make something similar" :smiley:
Can you elaborate a bit more on what do you mean by "show effect for the sprites"? I'm happy to tell how we did it, but I just don't get what exactly you are asking about.
Some more hints on how to progress the quest would be nice ;)
Like so.

Then create a new sprite, assign the material you've created, set the sprite of your choosing. Now the important step. Switch to "Debug" mode like so.

And select "Cast Shadow" option.

And that's pretty much it.
Feel free to ask if anything goes wrong.
We first made everything with the same pixel density of 16 pixels per Unity unit, but we found out that it looks pretty bad and distracting to have a lot of high frequency details in the environment, so we just scaled up two times all the 3d props.
@twan-mul Thank you very much for playing! You are so correct. We aimed way off with our scope right from the beginning and had to cut a lot of corners in the end to even publish the game in time. Wish we didn't spend that much time creating all the assets and spend more of it building the level, playtesting and making an actual game ending.
Glad you still enjoyed our game despite this issue! And thank you very much for playing.
- The camera should probably be a bit closer to (and higher than) the player by default; I thought for a second the game was in first person and I was looking at an NPC! It's cool that we can change the angle, though.
- The dialogue box sometimes gets hidden by geometry. It might be better to always make it appear on top.
- It is well hinted at but I guess it's a bit odd that simply talking to someone requires selecting your head first? I tried a few times to talk to the track legs salesman while having another body part selected.
- The way to obtain the diamond at the end isn't intuitive. I had to look it up. The rest of the quests made a lot more sense so it's mostly this one that needs tweaking! Maybe it should be made more obvious that Gears can turn coal into diamonds?
I agree with you about the camera. We even thought of preventing the player from tilting the camera so low.
Dialogue boxes clipping is just a bug, that we had no time to fix. I hope we will have a little bit of free time in the future to make a proper postjam version without bugs like this.
The fact that you need to select your head to start talking is actually just the result of the way I've programmed our dialogue system. It wasn't planned like this from the very beginning. So I guess it's a "bug" that became a feature :smile:
Yeah, we had the whole debate about that diamond quest. My colleagues were arguing that it was too hard to figure out, and I was thinking that it would be too easy if I start adding more hints. I guess they were right all along.
I really enjoyed your game. Graphics are for most part really great. That text box in the world, clipping into things, was bit annoying. Music is minimal and fitting for a robot world. Puzzles were on mostly nicely balanced (post-jam version). Only thing that I really disliked was moving through the world which felt really buggy and messy at times, I would get stuck on stuff, go behind certain elements and so on.
Overall I enjoyed playing, great job!