In the early 2010s, Luke Muscat was team lead on two massive mobile games for Halfbrick Studios—the WarioWare microgame turned macrohit Fruit Ninja, and endless runner Jetpack Joyride. A decade later he’s gone solo, and is making an indie game for PC that looks like a cross between Dave the Diver and Dome Keeper.
Feed the Deep is a roguelike diving game where you explore procedurally generated undersea caverns to collect resources—the way you launch multiple lines to pick up colorful chunky objects in the trailer looks real satisfying—while avoiding obstacles like the waving coral tentacles that try to grab you. You’ve also got oxygen to consider, and air-consuming distractions that include a terminal where you can play a Rise of the Triad clone boomer shooter mid-dive for some reason.
That’s not the real weird part, though. The real weird part is that you’re exploring and harvesting in service of keeping some Cthulhu-esque eldritch monstrosity placated so it doesn’t rise up and eat the floating cities above. Dave the Diver didn’t have to deal with this stuff. (I didn’t play the Dredge crossover, maybe he did actually.)
Feed the Deep is launching on Steam later this year. Muscat has been documenting his design journey on YouTube if you want to see another kind of Lovecraftian descent into madness, which is what it’s like being a solo indie developer in the 2020s.