A short colony simulator where you try to lead your little divers to productive ends, like producing energy and oxygen, so that they can keep breathing.

Made in my own engine I wrote on top of SDL! This is actually a part of my master's thesis, studying the development experience of using Rust to write a game engine :)

Note that the game starts in a paused state without any sound, so if you start playing, you'll need to select "Continue" (X on the keyboard) to start the game.

Guide

There is no clear objective to the game, but you'll probably figure out the bounds of the sandbox after playing a little bit. For further details, spoilers: the main objective of the game is to keep the divers alive. For that, they need oxygen, which is produced by divers with the "Oxygen mechanic" job. To make oxygen, they need energy, which is produced by divers with the "Energy producer" job. There is a third job, "Hauler", which can help the other two jobs be more efficient by allowing them to keep working while the hauler moves around the relevant resources. The 3 lines of information on the divers' cards are: Job, Morale, and Oxygen. The job can be changed in the Command Divers menu. If morale falls too low, the diver will go for a walk instead of working to recover some. If oxygen falls too low, the diver will try to find oxygen to refill it. The fun of the game is really just watching the simulation go, didn't manage to add in too much interactivity.

Keyboard and gamepad controls are supported, and the overlay at the bottom explains what the buttons do, but not the mouse (as you might expect from a colony sim).

The game is also on itch.io.

Jam details

I was originally going for the compo, but needed a bit more time. So the music and art was made by me during the jam. Music with Make Noise's Strega synthesizer (cut and filtered a little with Bitwig Studio), and art with Krita.

2025-04-09: macOS port

Heads up: I haven't tested the mac build at all, I just set GitHub Actions up so that it builds it, and uploaded the result here. The build commands are from an older game which I did test on a macOS, so it might work.

Given that porting after the jam is within the rules, I updated the builds with the most recent one, which made macOS builds possible. There shouldn't be any change at all to the Linux and Windows versions, but the web version now also uses the same mechanism for embedding files as the mac build, so it's a little different. It shouldn't have any visible effects on the game though, other than maybe better or worse loading times. I updated all of the platforms' builds in any case, so that they're all from the same version of the source code, which I also updated. You can find the code changes made after the deadline here (there's also one other commit after the deadline, but that was just the screenshots and cover image, no code or game asset changes).

Screenshot