DEMO PLAY: Deepophobia

This is a super glitchy beta demo.  It's also surprisingly well-focused on getting the feel of the game across, which is cute, cartoony and a little creepy.

You play as a repairer, going deep into a server to repair it.  You play as a deep-ocean diver with the ability to talk to needy fish.  Both of these may be the same person doing the same thing and the diving could be allegorical, so you don't really know.

You get sent in by this thing:  

Other than that, it's mostly exploring small areas looking for fish, some of which have something obviously wrong with them, some that want you to go find food for them and some just want you to find their friends. That's basically it for the content of the demo.

THE BULLETPOINTS OF SHAME:

• Crashes.  Quite a lot of them, especially when moving from area to area.
• Easy for the player avatar to get stuck - a bit of slightly larger hit-detection over either the surroundings (especially the ocean floor) or on the character themselves would make this harder to happen.

• The water effect isn't great and ends up looking like a heavy blue filter.  If it were more realistic it would be easier for the player to see and the cartoon-style of the characters would "pop" a bit more.

•  Character conversations can overlap, making everything the wrong type of confusing.

• The sounds need a bit of tweaking to make them palletable.
• A skip button for conversations rather than holding down the mouse button.
• Character moves EXTREMELY slowly - they need a slightly faster general movement or a much longer stamina bar.

The BULLETPOINTS OF HOPE:

• Controls are quite good and very easy to get a hang of.
• The atmosphere is surprisingly good, with some sections having genuine tension.
• It's weird.
• The designs for the places are interesting, with hints of more going on beneath the surface (pun intended).
• For a beta demo, there's a fair bit to do and see.
• The overall appearence is nicely cohesive.
• "Hey friend, what do you...NOTAFRIENDNOTAFRIENDNOTAFRIEND" moment early on was pretty good!

Interesting idea but major technical problems, needs some heavy-duty tweaking.  Would likely run better as a pixel side-scrolling adventure game or a rebuild in Unreal engine that already has pre-built assets for altering, including effects, and a large community of builders and tutorial makers.

Will I play it later on?  Yes.  It may not be a AAA product, but at least it's interesting!