Orb of the deep? by is.a.hatbox
Play on itch.io
In Orb of the deep? you descend into a mysterious cave filled with overly agile skeletons. These guys don’t walk, they teleport straight to your face the moment they hear or see you. Why? Because giving them actual pathfinding was too much work.
Your mission is simple: Eliminate the skeletons and retrieve the Orb. Then run. Like, really run. You’ll find out why.
How to play
[Arrow Keys] – Move and jump. You’ve got momentum, the sky is the limit if you run enough
[Spacebar] – Throw a dart.
[X] – Silent kill.


Credits
- Assets: Trapmoor Dungeon by itchabop
- Font: CelticTime by LunarRay
- Sound Effects: Generated using sfxr
- Engine: Pygame-CE
- Tiled + pytmx
- Pygbag
- Huge thanks to DaFluffyPotato for the awesome Pygame Platformer Tutorial - Full Course
| Itch.io | https://is-a-hatbox.itch.io/ld57 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/orb-of-the-deep |
Ratings
| Overall | 667th | 3.211⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 614th | 3.105⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 422th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 459th | 3.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 541th | 2.583⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 507th | 2.643⭐ | 16🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 678th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
anyway like action flow, like it nes styles, well done
I cant kill the second skeleton on this level. :(
Yesterday after getting all the functionality in place I realized it was way too hard. I had a really hard time trying to design the map so it's playable but each section works like a puzzle, you need to "flip" the enemy by jumping if it’s looking at a spot you need to pass through.
Also… I completely forgot to explain some pretty important mechanics
- Wall sliding silences your jump
- The higher you jump, the more noise you make
- Skeletons will turn and look toward the source of the sound
And restarting on each death... I should have added checkpoints :D
Main feedback would've been trying to slowly ramp up difficulty so the player learns certain patterns like wall sliding, or distracting with jumps, or assassinating while on wall slide. Cool concept!
The level design was pretty good. When I saw the look I was expecting an action platformer and was pretty surprised to find out its more of a puzzle game.
Don't think I can add any new feedback to the comments. Finding a way to teach the mechanics one by one would probably be a great route to go. There was something fun about being thrown in the deep end and just figuring it out though.
Great job and congrats on finishing!
Imagine that I had to delete the first version of enemy detection because instead of just checking horizontally I was checking in 360 degrees when you made a sound, designing a playable level was impossible in that version.
Thank you so much for the valuable feedback and nice comments! I will for sure give more attention to introducing the player to all the mechanics in future projects.
@marudziik I used this [Pygbag](https://github.com/pygame-web/pygbag) to build a web version of the game with minimal changes to the code. If I can recommend one thing is to add it to the project since the beginning, debugging issues can be hard, did not figure out a way to have logs.
I also loved the pixel art XD, you can find it here [assets](https://itchabop.itch.io/trapmoor-an-8bit-platformer-tileset)
The gameplay needs a good polish. The "walljumps" are a big problem. I managed to get the treasure at the bottom but I couldn't get back up. It was mostly due to my lack of skill.
I'm sure this little spark of a game idea could become something big in the future.
Great entry. Congratulations!
PS:
1 - I just found out he has a big jump. I'll try again.
2 - I fell out of the dungeon :)

Totally understand the frustration with the walljump, my least favorite part of the game is exactly that, seeing the skeleton weirdly jump between the too walls as if it had an infinite jump. I spent a lot of time on that and when I had a "good enough" version I then had to increase the size of the characters leaving it interacting weirdly with the little passageways. Seeing the final result after so much time spent on that mechanic was not great, but I'm proud I moved on and released it instead of focusing more on that.
Regarding 1 and 2, I laughed so hard with this, I see you used the big jump.
Thank you so much for the feedback!

Is there a windows build I can try?