Hello everyone!

I thought I would share how it was like to make Submerged. During the theme submitting phase, we had talked amongst ourselves to find out what we wanted to create. Turns out, one of us wanted to go cave exploring, one wanted aliens, another one wanted a mermaid fairy paradise, and the last one wanted to create a game about linguistics. I am not going to lie, I thought we were doomed. BUT turns out, Ancient Ruins was the perfect theme to create an alien mermaid underwater cave diving adventure centered on merm-alien culture! Who knew?
We hadn't put much thought into what our gameplay would be like beyond this desire to create a game that had a little bit of what we all loved and was centered around exploring , so we analysed our strengths. We had two team members who had jammed before (Hekkusu and myself) and two newcomers who are from other fields but had an interest in dabbling in game development. So we put our strenghths to work!
I programmed, did the sound design, and worked on scenery.
Hekkusu was our main animator and character artists, making portraits, enemys, our character (and pet!).
Louise7 was a first time jammer and created a beautiful storyline for our game, made a script for every bit of dialogue!
and Shooliagods, also a newcomer, managed to make our UI/UX clean and beautiful, making portrait frames, small pixel details (all the bubbles!!) that brought everything together.

***So this post is an encouragement to everyone who is not a dev, you can do it! You too can jam! ***
So congratulations to all the first time jammers, I hope you are proud of what you accomplished!
I know we are <3

TREASURES is a rouge-lite platformer where you collect treasure and then return to the surface. While at first this game seems to be simple, it actually has a high skill cap. Here are some tips and tricks to help you collect more treasure and get better at the game.

1.Wall Climbing. If you are stuck in a place that seems you can't get out of, try wall climbing. Move either left or right, jump(space) and press J, you will grab onto the wall and stay there until you jump or press J again. Now while you are on the wall repeat the steps again and you will scale the wall like it's nothing (just make sure to time your wall jumps).

2.Rare treasure. There are three different rarities common, uncommon, and rare chests. When you are looking around for treasure, if you see this one then something expensive will be inside! https://im.ezgif.com/tmp/ezgif-1-d45e583bc1e5-jpg/ezgif-frame-001.jpg

3.Hidden Treasure. When you encounter one of the tents or huts make sure to go near it because a treasure could be hiding behind it.
Sometimes treasure spawns behind tents or huts so keep an eye out for them.

4.Head Up to the Surface When You Have Low Health. When you are descending in to the lower levels of the cave make sure you keep track of your health, spikes, creatures and even falling could end your run! So be wise and make a descision to go up before it's too late.

5.Make Wise Descisions on what you are carrying. When you find some treasure take a little time to think "Is it worth it to pick this up". Remember you only have twelve slots before you can't collect anymore treasure, so make sure you know what treasure you're picking up so you don't run out of space when you find rare treasure.

6.Better treasure. The deeper you go you will find better and more expensive treasure but you will also find more creatures so make sure you are ready for it.

Thank you for reading this post. If you have any questions about TREASURES, feel free reply and ask.
The game https://alakajam.com/11th-alakajam/1089/treasures/

Play Wandering Soul Here

'Tis a hard game. I'd advise not playing it if you aren't comfortable with bullet hells. lol

Mid-jam I feared that I won't have anything remotely playable, but in the end I was able to submit something.

What went well

• The scope was rather well chosen all things considered. Fortunately I was able to shave off a lot of features that I have initially planned, without compromising the core gameplay too much.
• I was very pleased to discover the pixel tool in Affinity Photo.
• Choice of a 12x12 tiny block size helped a lot, since this was my first foray into pixel art after two decades.
• Love2d was great to use, I didn't have any hickups.
• Somehow I managed to retain a normal sleep schedule.

What went poorly

• I have realized way too late that my logic for making pieces fall after explosion is wrong. This makes the game harder than intended.
• I've spent too much time animating the conveyor belt, when I realized I could have had it done in a few minutes.
• The controls are not well explained and somewhat unintuitive, they require more work. This is similar to my previous game, so definitely something to work at.
• Too much time wasted just playing around with the game rather than coding.

What's next
I'd like to continue working on this one a bit. There are so many features that the game is missing:

• Music and sound.
• Actual puzzles, requiring some planning.
• More levels.
• Crawling, jumping, falling…

Some of the features I wanted to have in the original game. In my head the game should have looked much more like ancient ruins, in the current version one has to squint quite a bit to find the theme.

• Sand tiles that always spill over.
• Buttons and doors.
• Water and water bricks.
• Traps.

Can you restore the Сolosseum from its ruins?

I just have the sound and music left (plus some minor tweaks).
In the meantime, here's a video of me beating the boss:

And that's it for us! After two all nighters we get to rest a little.

If you have some time, here is the link to our submission:
https://hex-zu.itch.io/submerged

You guys did awesome, hang on just a bit more! ♡

I have meshes, textures, effects & at least one game mechanic, so I might be able to finish a game tomorrow and not just a walking sim. ✨
I'm fine if it is though and I'll just focus on what I enjoy doing.

First jam where I actually went outside with a camera to get some textures, threw them into Materialize and generated my own diffuse and normal maps to work with.

A faction of gamedevs has decided to show their passion for the Mushrooms theme, and integrate it into their games anyway. So let's give everyone an additional (an totally optional) incentive to put mushrooms in here some way or another!

The ANCIENT MUSHROOM AWARD can be given by anyone, to anyone during the ratings phase. When you see a game that deserves it, simply paste the badge picture into a comment for the award to be counted.

At the end of the jam, we'll tally the amount of given awards… and nominate the ANCIENT MUSHROOM KINGS :D

Award giving kit

• Badge markup for giving the award

  ![](https://i.imgur.com/tPAx0I4.png>

• Pics

Looking forward to see your games! Don't forget to take breaks and have a decent night of sleep :)

It's coming up to dinner time so I'm going to stop and get some food in me, really happy with how much progress I've made so far only a few elements left for the initial puzzle implementation and then I can look at designing the next two environments I want to include.

It's just a small point and click but I'm doing this solo and I'm trying my best to keep it within my abilities so I can finish this time.