Digging Through Ludum Dare 48
Nearly 4,000 games were built over one weekend for Ludum Dare 48, whose theme “deeper and deeper” pulled double duty: thousands of digging or falling takes, plus a wave of more creative twists. Below are our picks from the jam, which run the gamut from frantic action to puzzle-y distractions. The source of every game listed is in the linked repository — write-up authors used JavaScript, C#, Lua, Haxe, Rust, Kotlin, and GDScript across these submissions.
Descent Engines
We Have to Go Deeper is part of Ludum Dare ' submission list, letting you pilot a sub while a pushy professor looms overhead. You play an unpaid assistant keeping your cool. The mood channels grad school at a fraction of the cost. It ships for Web and Windows, where the Unity source (C#) is also easy to follow.
The well-liked Deeper and Deeper is a creature of two open-source tools: it runs on the Phaser JavaScript framework for browser play, and its levels were authored with the editor LDtk, which shares a maker with Dead Cells. New levels are on the table — the repository's assets/levels.ldtk is there to be extended.
Want more firefighting? Nuclear Blaze, also from the Dead Cells maker, mixes jokes, big particles, and a load of fires to tame.
Surface is a space-flavored gravity exercise: your ship floats in an argon-heavy atmosphere, making it too light to descend. Cargo — meteorites you shoot — adds mass, so the math becomes an obstacle in itself, right down to mixing the gas composition, your spacecraft's dimensions and mass, and the local gravitational pull. You need quite a few rocks.
If chess is your obsession, Chess Hellevator gives pawns free will: each turn you pick among three offensive moves. It runs on Godot and pulls no punches on the hell theme. The CGA-era web games that reference the Queen’s Gambit trend sparked a different fan project at kilobytes gambit.
Step into a Broforce-style shooter in Fetal Fury, where you have 60 seconds to escape and every line is a pun. The HaxeFlixel build runs Web, Windows, and macOS.
Punch fish for cash in Fishing Trouble. It plays like a joke from the tutorial straight into a barrel (minus the barrel). Same engine family: built with Haxe.
Feeling nostalgic? Dwammings is a Lemmings-like with beer management: dig, mine, climb, break, and drink to survive. The Unity build lists Windows, macOS, and the browser.
For the energetic: Bunny Bunny Dig Dig gives you treasure-digging in an action-RPG wrapper with bats and bombs doing their worst. It's not alone in starring a rabbit.
Into a skull-heavy descent? Drillmin pairs monochrome with a nonstop drill to the core while lava rushes behind. The game supports Web, Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Your platformer options: Ziggurat (beautiful pixel art and music, plus a rabbit guide into your own psyche) and Into the Castle, a jump-n-dash at everything the wizard-king throws at you, glasses included.
Find recursive depth in Micronaut, a Rust-written maze where the mechanic pays off.
For the Sokoban set: Physics Breaking Boxes layers reusable boxes and recursion on top of the classic formula, and Inside the Box asks the same question from the inside.
A nightmare goes light with Sweet Dreams, a Kotlin platformer by a first-time Ludum Dare participant where fear has a name. Similarly playful, Sleepie Cookie Eatie lets you dig and snack your way down a cookie mine — the more you eat, the sharper your shovel, thanks to Godot.
Deep Divers
The underwater angle tunes into fewer absurdist notes. Sunk Cost sends a submarine deep into a hostile — suddenly angry — fish population, where hull integrity and pressure meters matter, all built in Unity.
Keeping the drill fueled just right to keep the seas safe is at the heart of Blue Cheese Lunar Descent, a lunar digging mission in Phaser and JavaScript. Expect generator runs, machine repairs at the drill, and the ability throw debris at aggressors while hunting for cheese on the moon.
A tighter space: What Goes Up… was truncated; see Deeper and Deeper. Speaking of tighter spaces, the wave-based arcade action in Fetal Fury is the one to make 60 seconds count.
Source code from every project above is linked in the corresponding jam entry. The community runs on collaborations — good places to start if you'd rather bend gravity, time, lives, or health than start from scratch.
Staff Pick: Submarine Bean
Submarine Bean takes you on a gentle underwater expedition in a tiny submersible. It’s available to play in the browser or on Windows, and the full source code is on GitHub, built with Unity and C#.
This entry is notable as the first Ludum Dare for developer @IcosoDev. The fact that a first-time participant can produce a polished, charming experience like this says a lot about the jam’s accessibility. If you’ve been thinking about joining, the next competition begins October 1 — a good opportunity to give it a shot.
These picks represent just twenty of the 3,866 entries submitted this round. You can browse the full list of games and leave feedback for developers whose work caught your eye.
If you enjoyed this roundup, there are more open source game collections worth exploring:
