This is the preserved original jam version of Abysm, created for the Bevy Spooky Jam 2024. The current version of this game is improved in virtually every way, as I'm working to turn it into a full release, and the demo is available at https://renons.itch.io/abysm.

Something ancient is stirring in the darkness below a small town, and your supervisor has sent you there to investigate and report back what you find. The sense of dread as you descend into the catacombs is overwhelming, can you survive the Abysm?

Abysm is a retro style puzzle game with a cosmic horror theme, inspired by classics such as Boulder Dash.

Control your character using WASD, your arrow keys, or the DPAD of a game controller. Escape brings up the pause menu from where you can restart a level if you get stuck. 

Features

  • Twelve levels
  • Full keyboard and gamepad support
  • Persisted progress and settings

Credits

This is my submission to the Bevy Spooky Jam with the theme "Eldritch", I hope you enjoy my game as much as I've enjoyed working on it! This is my second jam game and my second Bevy game.

A big Thank You needs to go out to my awesome play testers!

Known Issues

  • The web performance can be really bad on less powerful machines because of an issue related to the lighting system running on WebGL2. Since browser support for WebGPU still is spotty and I don't want to completely prevent some people from running the game, I decided to remain on WebGL2 despite this issue. You have two options:
    • At startup, enter the "Settings" menu and hit the "Disable Lighting" button, then reload the page.
    • The Windows build, which is also available, does not suffer from this issue, so please try that if you can. This is the superior build anyhow, letting you enjoy full screen mode and the pretty lights, which adds greatly to the ambiance.
  • Sometimes gamepads are registered too late and then the game can't use them. Randomly interacting with the gamepad while the game is loading seems to cure that ailment
More information

Download

Download
abysm_windows07.zip 20 MB

Development log

Comments

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c64cosmin111 days ago

Big fan of BD games, recently BD40th anniversary just released, and I am also working on my own BD game. Love to see more BD games to play, the atmosphere and the vibes you game has is fantastic. Keep up the good work, please let me know if you need any help with the game, testing, etc. I am happy to help <3

Reply
Renons109 days ago

Hello c64cosmin!
Thanks for your kind comment! I looked at what you're posting on BlueSky, looks really cool, that was an instant follow.

Yes, I played BD as a kid, and while there are many clones, I still think it's a bit of a forgotten corner of the gaming universe. A good 50% of the people who have looked at my game just have no idea what a Boulder Dash is, and that crowd is still heavily skewed towards slightly older and more experienced gamers.

As for play testing, I might very well take you up on that offer, I'm slowly inching my way towards a new release of the test version of the full game. If so, I'll obviously offer to return the favor :-)

Reply
c64cosmin108 days ago

I shared your game on the Supaplex Online Discord community, I think that would be the best place for us to share and chat about our games, I also have my own gamedev community but we're less active. Thank you very much for your reply, I played the whole game in the demo and enjoyed the puzzles a lot, they were very well structured to give me that "argh, this is hard....oooooh that is how, no way, neat" kind of reaction after playing. I really love everything about your game and I am super intrigued!

Reply
Renons108 days ago

"I shared your game on the Supaplex Online Discord community"

Cool, thanks!

"to give me that "argh, this is hard....oooooh that is how, no way, neat" kind of reaction after playing."

That's awesome to hear, exactly what one wants when creating puzzles :-)

Reply