The Chronicles of Mr. Marmo

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 Gamejam LudumDare LD57

April 6th 2025

The mad scientist is not satisfied with having blown up the moon! He certainly lost his marbles, now getting his drainage system ready to drain the seven seas for the treassure that lays in its dephts.

  • Theme: Depths
  • Team: Lizz

Goal:

Via exploration discover all pipe puzzles, connect them and when all are done seek the valve at the bottom of the sea to drain the ocean. Be careful for the beasts that will harm you, mad scientist. Either they make you drop the pearls, you thought were your marbles, or force you to restart the level if you don't have any pearls anymore.MrMarmoCover

Highscore:

Drain all seven seas and earn a spot on the highscore table! Also, every level got it's own highscore table

Controls:

  • Explore: Arrow keys
  • Swim up/speed: Spacebar
  • Puzzles: Mouse to click
  • Reset player: R-key  

 

 

Watch out for these! banner_enemies

Pearls and clams are your friends banner_friends

These can hide pearls banner_neutrals

Trivia:

  • The song that plays at the start at each level was supposed to be temporary, but playtesters liked it and I did not have time to make something more serious, so there you go :)
  • Mr Marmo is supposed to be "Marbles" translated into italian. But I accidentally translated "Marble", the white stone. And the game contains pearls instead of marbles, so the name is not related at all anymore :grin:

Version control:

  • V1.1
    • Highscores displayed as Ascending instead of Descending. I fixed that
    • Fixed two bugs on main menu screen: after gameover the screen would go dark + Alignment issues
    • Added Reset Key in the case you get stuck

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Comments

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Wouter52

April 16th 2025

@dis0rder Thank you for your in depth performance testing! To be honest, I'm not sure what is causing those slowdowns. I have been poking through the leveldata to try and figure out what could cause this.

The code that determines the darkness of the rendering is calculated every gametick and is based on the diffrence between the water level and the Y position of the player. So that should be a constant between levels.

The amount of pearls, plants and enemies change each level, however: I can't find significant variations between the amounts. I have to debug myself on one of my potatoe pc's to find the root cause.

The idea of exploring after draining crossed my mind, it could be very interesting to try that in a post-jam version maybe 🤔 Although, now there is a clear finish, so I have to think about how that should work maybe. Someone else had another idea: start the next level at the drainlevel where the previous ended. That way one could play with diffrent play-orders :)

Thanks again! That was really interesting and I apreciate your time and effort.

@lereveur so great to see you here! Thank you for your kind and honest feedback! Indeed, programmer art can be so much more than only graphics 😁

@aweskybear Thanks for your feedback! I tried making clear that the mouse can be used to put a little indicator at the top left of the screen. Where would you expect such a thing? Above the player maybe?

Dis0rder

April 16th 2025

Gotta love your a capella -rendition of SMB's Water-stage music!

If you'll continue development perhaps you could go ahead and cover SMB3's and DKC's respective underwater-themes too? 😛 🎵 🚰

Appreciate you've coded the whole thing yourself! 👏

Since you're a system programmer, I thought you might be interested in my tongue-in-cheek low-end CPU "benchmark-test."

(...which basically means I just happened to try your game on my ancient dumpster-hardware.)

OS: Lubuntu 20.04.6 LTS
Hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 2.40 GHz, 4GB RAM, MCP89-GPU
Browser: Mozilla Firefox 136.0 (64-bit)

I noticed that the game slows down drastically in these three levels: 2,4,5.

My first thought was that it has something to do with the level-size or perhaps the "darkness/depth"-effect. But I think there must be something else to it?

If you want to optimize or feel otherwise intrigued you could try to find out what might be causing it. The levels 1,3,6,7 seemed to work "normally" in my user-experience.

As for the gameplay I don't have much to add what others haven't already pointed out before.

I like the way you've combined puzzles and platforming. The rotation-puzzles are fun and easy to solve even though they seem daunting at the first glance.

The core-idea of draining the water could probably be innovated further; for example it would be interesting if the player could explore the drained level by jumping around. Designing levels with that approach would be a challenge in itself though, but just food for thought!

AweSkyBear

April 15th 2025

Such a cute little entry! It has its own very retro character! ^^ I like the graphics and the puzzles. I didn't immediately realize I need to use the mouse click (maybe a hotkey or a visual hint when I am near would suffice) but ones I did it made all sense!

I also like the entire chuu-chuu tracks / very nice :D and the coin-like marble grabbing. : ))

GJ!

LeReveur

April 14th 2025

Except of the few times I got stuck in or near close to a rock because of the hitbox bug (and then I finally discovered that R teleports to the start without reinit of pearls and puzzles - nice idea!) ; and sometimes the unreacheable pearls (I'm not talking about secret tunnels, but sometimes few pearls appeared into a rock - f.ex. in one ground rock I could walk on, but obviously not into) ; this was a very fun time playing this game! I love the artworks, and the voice cover is just a good demo of that programer's art is not limited to graphics :P but still adds to the cuteness and uniqueness of this entry.
Very well done!

Wouter52

April 14th 2025

Hi @adhvik! Thanks for your comment! What aspects did you find best? And are there things we could've done better to make it even more fun for you to play?

Adhvik

April 14th 2025

INSANELY GOOD GAME (ps i love the music)

Wouter52

April 14th 2025

@wuppos no worries, I love your idea's! I love it when people are honest and give feedback about how to do it better. I will use this in the post-jam version, or at least in the next LD I will try and incorperate it into the form the game will take shape in then :-)

Wuppos

April 13th 2025

@wouter52 Hmm, I guess the main reason it felt a bit repetitive for me were the controls/physics. Swimming is most of what you are doing all the time (besides solving the puzzles ofc, which I really liked), so I think the game would feel much better and less repetitive when the swimming is more satisfying. Maybe the speeds with which you go up and down could be played with a bit, or simply more 'juice' when swimming. Or perhaps a dive button with which you can go down faster? Maybe that would give a bit more interesting movement to play with while travelling from one pearl to the other.

I hope I am not being too critical! Those are just some thoughts I had, but I am by no means an expert. Just trying to learn alongside you :)

Wouter52

April 13th 2025

@outstar thanks for playing! It was really interesting to actually see someone play the game. Putting the highscore somewhere visable instead of behind a button is a great idea. I'll try to do that next time

The puzzle is triggered by the yellow platforms that are in the area, maybe I should have made that clear in the first level. The plants are just there to be background graphics and to hide pearls and enemies sometimes :)

Thank you for playing and streaming!

Outstar

April 13th 2025

I really enjoyed the pipe minigame, that was fun! Finding pearls was a cool added feature, although I think it would be nicer to promote the highscore leaderboard a bit more (maybe directly in the main menu?) so we can understand early why we're doing this (gamification of the competitiveness :D). Loved the little audio bits, I wish they were longer! My main feedback is that sometimes it wasn't clear which objects were interactable and which were just visual clutter, like the little plants (?) triggering the puzzle to start - I stepped on many and didn't know which ones were the right ones to touch :) Overall, really nice job, fun that you coded it all in javascript!


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