The Merciless Deep

I just love this so much!
I really have no complaints, and I gotta dig through your code to learn how you did this awesome hair animation.

Incredible job for such a short time!

@cuddl3s good luck then. I was in a hurry sunday and because I had a lot of tokens left, I did some very messy stuff. The procedural generation is especially cryptic :)

Nice addictive game, I like the graphics and sound. It realy convice me that I should learn to do some animation.

Not much to say about this game except it's very good. I liked the strategy behind the oxygene refills, should I tried to go as deep as possible without stopping or shoud i try to stop to refill my oxygene but expose myself to hermit crabs and/or fish? Really good well done!

Your entry obviously has an incredible feel of quality to it. The character design is fantastic and I really like the idea of losing the suit as a second chance. It's just super charming all around. Can't put in words how much I love the hair.

At some parts, the game feels a bit thrown together, as there are a few mechanics that appear to be stacked on top for no apparent reason. For example, while both crouching and holding onto ledges are super cute details, they're details and not used much. Might be that you didn't get to build around this more than you wanted to.

I also liked the music a lot at first, but it also felt a bit short and rushed. Sadly, because it is a really catchy tune!

Great entry, definitely sparked my interest in trying out other games you made.

Good stuff as always. I would have liked more progression as I got deeper and deeper, at least a subtle change of the palette? Unless I didn't go far enough :) Nice work with the details – the ledge grabbing, crouching, wearing shells as a hat, even the boat at the beginning of the level.

I had some minor nitpicks:

Jumping on a fish kill it, which is what I would expect. By default, this makes the character bounce upwards quite a lot. Holding the down arrow key prevents this, which felt very intuitive, but I feel it could have been mentioned somewhere in the description.

Sometimes I walked all the way up to a clam to open it with a shell. But, just as I pressed the key, my character turned around and sent the shell the other way, which sometimes led to losing an oxygen tank. Was that a case of the character bouncing off the clam?

Love this game, made the drownding a little too real but dang dude sick game, and in 48 H whoa!

OKAY so this is masterful. Like everyone else I at first took it as a 'see how deep you can get' simple platformer. But no, the game page clearly says 'get back to your boat'. I don't think this is communicated very well in-game though, but I'm not sure of a nice way to do it. Those of you who have only gone DOWN are missing out on half of the game, and let me tell you the second half is entirely different. Going UP is much harder and suddenly a lot of decisions start to make sense, such as why bouncing off a fish pushes you up so high (@Aurel300).

I don't think it'd be a stretch to say the gameplay here is inspired by Ridiculous Fishing or similar, and it is really well executed other than a small tiny glitches like hitting a crab against a shell from too close resulting in the shell going to the wrong way (does the player get moved out of the shell hitbox?).

Loved the gameplay, great graphics, especially the diver's hair. Good audio and a solid use of the theme. I hope some of our highscore submitters will see this and fix their submitted scores!

Amazing job, one of my favourites despite the fact that I suck at it :) It's very retro both in art style (of course, because Pico-8) but also in difficulty. So I mostly just admired the lovely pixel art (especially the hair of the main character, once I inevitably lost the diving suit) and the cheerful music.

It seems quite a few people forgot about the description while playing. Truth to be told so did I, but the comical amount of air tanks got me to double check. Sometimes minimalism backfires. A few simple words after death would have solved the issue, for instance:
You are dead!
Get back to the boat to receive a score.

Once understood, the concept is great. There are some issues though:

• Why do all of the hermit crabs decide to fall off their platforms when the diver happens to be below them? This makes no sense logically, but it also makes it annoying to keep dodging the falling crabs! They should stay put, and maybe another critter could follow the diver around if that kind of hazard is really needed at all.
• Dealing with the ledges is finicky at times. It is a hard problem to solve, but the venerable Spelunky does an excellent job at it, so copying that model should be an easy fix.
• Looking up and down would help with both phases of they journey. This too can be copied straight from Spelunky, now that I think about it.

Good work in all, too bad many people didn't get to enjoy it as it was supposed to be… merciless!