get it from my shop | get it on Steam | get it on itch.io | get it on GOG | get soundtrack

reviews: Rock Paper Shotgun | Destructoid | World of Legions | Adventure Game Hotspot

overwhelmingly positive timestamp | Humble Bundle

remastered graphics: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3, sample 4, the ladder

Become the Researcher
Submachine is a hand-drawn point and click adventure game. You will find yourself in a vast network of desolate locations containing puzzles, secrets, notes and inventory items to collect to help you along the way.

the World of Submachine
The underground world of submerged machines offers you vast variety of locations and structures to discover and repair. While everything is shattered, you will try to put things back together to understand and escape.

Story
You are alone here. You will follow the footsteps of a banished lighthouse keeper discovering his descent into ruins of Submachine. The story is divided into chapters that will unlock for you as you progress through the game. The story is conveyed by series of notes that you’ll collect and read.

Puzzles
There are tons of puzzles, some of which you’ll solve by bringing the machinery back online, tinkering with it, turning off and on again. For others you’ll need to find missing parts, levers that were broken off or stolen, depleted power sources, gears, cogs, lamps, coils and so on. As you move through the structure, you will be putting back together things that were shattered.

Graphics
Entire game is hand-drawn. There’s nothing auto-generated nor procedural. Each location was thoughtfully designed. Stylized drawings give the game it’s eerie atmosphere.

Music
Ambient music for this game was created by ThumpMonks, with chapter 1 ambient by Marcus Gutierrez. The music perfectly emphasizes the atmosphere of lonely exploration.

download this game for free from itch.io | play online on Newgrounds

  read original release post from 2013

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“Daymare Cat is a gorgeously sketched exploratory platformer that feels like a simple adventure game. The platforming here isn’t particularly challenging, but almost every hand-drawn scene is worth witnessing.” – said some by now non-existent indie game review website in 2013.

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The main character of this game is Cat Jahnke, and I’m not talking about the in-game little girl, but the singer and songwriter, who created the song that this game is all about. This is the reason why this particular game stands out in my catalogue of games. Hats off to you, Cat. Let’s just hope that you’re right in the song, and things will finally get better.

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Meanwhile, it’s 2023. How is it possible that it’s been 10 years already… Daymare Cat is the ancestor of Slice of Sea, one could even say that it was the foundation of Seaweed’s game. Cat is the OG.

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This game needed some major upgrading, since its release my gamedev art direction and workflow changed drastically.  Things that are new in this Anniversary Edition:

• The game is in glorious 60 fps and plays in full screen.
• Most noticeably the game has new background texture. This might be a bit controversial take, but in my opinion this improves the vibe.
• Interactive items have a color. Yes. A color.
• Cat now runs like a ballerina, not a raptor. Thank god.
• Platforming is a bit easier thanks to hitbox tweaking but also by redrawing platforms in few places, for reference check the main gate.
• I added a new pathway for you in case you have a fear of being eaten alive by a cosmic horror monster and really don’t want to do this part. So now you can go around it.
• No changes were done to the music, since it’s already perfection.

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Meanwhile, a year later:

Oh, I completely forgot to upload this game to the OG flash portals, Newgrounds and Kongregate. Uploaded them on November 11th 2024. Our independence day. The 3rd anniversary of release of Slice of Sea.

Results after 24 hours:

On Newgrounds:

Home improvement tips! Upgrade your climbing rope to a brass ladder to lighten up the room!

download this game for free

Hear me out.

For the sake of my mental health, today I decided to take a one-day break from remastering Submachine into Legacy (I’m still finishing chapter 8) and see how things were back in the good old days of flash development over a decade ago. Not sure why I started tinkering with “Where is 2010?”, but here we are with a brand new version – renamed into more lore-friendly title of Daymare Stray. I think I was just curious to see how the code looked like in those old days. Not code per se, but my thought process concerning constructing game logic. It was… strange. Like reading your old diary pages, stepping into your old self. Then I changed main character animations to look a bit better, then switched to 60 fps, which prompted me to update all animations, and and then also sound design needed a bit of love. The screenshot you see above shows a small graphical change in which I emphasized the fact that you can climb back left up that wall, as in old version it was not so obvious. Is this a one-day remaster? Nah, that will come when I remaster entire series into one big game, just like Submachine Legacy. But I have to admit – it was fun to get back to flash for one day. It’s also super convenient to be able to draw and code in one application. This really highlights the genius of flash workflow. The freedom to create in an instant. Don’t get me wrong, working in Game Maker and Photoshop and Spine and Flash all at once is also super fine, but flash was on a completely different level. It made a game designer out of me after all. Ah, to be young again…

Enjoy this little trip down the memory lane!

[2024 update: Changed game background to match the upcoming remaster of entire series].

Well, this is a first.

My first year without anything published. First such year since… 2004 or so. Not a game, not a comic book, nothing. But there’s a good reason for this.

Nothing was published, yet so very much was created.

Let me elaborate.

The era of free, small games is long over, a sentiment cemented last year by the ending of “10 Gnomes” and “Where is?…” series of games that were born in the online web browser flash era of days gone.

Would you believe there were people caught by surprise, that the 12-year project of 10 Gnomes ended after 12 years. Shocking, I know.

So this year it came as a no surprise to me that there were people asking where is “Where is 2023?” game, after the series clearly ended last year. Clearly. This series ended so much, that I even wrote about it in last year’s wrap-up.

Now. Let’s take a look:

Plan A

Submachine: Legacy. The remaster of all Submachine games smashed together into one, giant Steam release. I need to write completely new engine for this. I also need to retouch some graphics that clearly need some love after a decade of remaining small-sized web games. I also need to export all of those graphics from flash, animate all moving things in Spine 4.0 or newer and finally create all logic from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2.37 or newer. Is this all doable in one year?… Let’s see.

2022 was the first year of working on just one project. That project being the remaster of all Submachine games.

This was my workflow goal since a long time ago, being able to focus on just one project at a time. Now, some people say this may lead to a burnout, and they might be right, though I never experienced that during development of any Submachine game. The solution to this conundrum is simple – long time ago I was also a comic book author, some of you might remember. Switching between two drastically different projects lets you avoid burnout if you feel tired doing one thing for months on end. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I still have around 5 comic books on the back burner in case I get tired of creating games. Which I assume will happen after the release of Submachine: Legacy. This will be the year of the shift.

But first, let me walk you through the development process of 2022. After taking a brief sabbatical after finishing Slice of Sea, which realistically ended some time after game release (fixing bugs, adding features, monitoring comments and reviews for possible gameplay improvement opportunities etc) I started writing Submachine game template from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2 in March of 2022.

Why from scratch, you might ask, since I already had the template of Slice of Sea to use?

Writing templates from scratch is probably the best part of game development. Everything is fresh, new, the code is not bloated, you find all your own new paths, you get a boost of confidence in your skill, everything is fine and dandy. Even if you wrote particular chunks of code before you write them anew, looking for improvements that you can make on the way.

the only thing I took from Slice of Sea was the inventory, which to this day I consider as my pinnacle of development achievement and the best thing to happen to my point and click games since… Well, since I got the idea to create the first Submachine back in 2005. It’s that good. In my opinion. Which will surely change in few years.

But Submachine navigation is something completely different from what was implemented in Slice of Sea. You had your Seaweed to move around there, remember? In Submachine you just point and click, no walking of any kind is involved. More over, from time to time I still get those things called “ideas” on how to code things in a better and more efficient way. You see, I had one of those “ideas” in early 2022, so all Submachine template preparation I did before that went straight to trash. Well, proverbially, because I maniacally archive everything I create and keep it on external drives as well as on my PC and my server. At least four copies of all projects. Don’t get me started about archiving things, it’s a long story for another time. So all preparation went to a folder in my archive to never be seen or used again.

But that new template, man, that was something to behold. It went so smoothly, that in one month I already had all mechanics implemented. The movement mechanics are so slick that I even had all locations (rooms) from all Submachines added to that new template by the end of April. All traversable and ready for navigation. I was so very focused in by then, design milestones were flying by, in May I had all necessary logic for creating a playable point and click game (finding items, using items, saving object states, inventory, movement and so on).

And then, in May, I entered another development milestone. The one I’m still in right now… Recreating all active elements and animations using Spine Animation and adding all puzzles to the game. The real meat of the game. Recreating complete Submachine Ancient Adventure took me about a week. Submachine 1 – two weeks. Submachine 2 – a month. You see the pattern? Remember that each consecutive game is bigger and more complex than the previous one? Yeah, and here we are in January of 2023 and I’m still recreating puzzles and active elements, by now in Submachine 8. I barely managed to finish recreating Submachine 7 in December of 2022. Mind you – two biggest chapters are still ahead of me, and one of them is Submachine 10, which in itself is like 5 other games put together size-wise. So yeah, the task of compressing 10 years of game development into one big game for Steam is taking it’s time. I know that’s not a problem for you, you will wait as long as it takes to get final build of the game that is up to my standards. I’m not burned out, I am working on the game every day and I can’t wait to finish it and show you guys the result. I can’t wait to see your reactions to the Legacy. But for that – we all have to wait a bit longer.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Preparing a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo) campaign. Once funded – print them decks, send to backers and release the game worldwide. There are countless more steps to this entire thing, but these are biggest milestones. I also want to create loads of youtube videos going over rules and unclear situations that might occur during gameplay.

I decided to release this game after the release of Submachine: Legacy. I count on the fact that Steam release might help a bit with popularity of this here card game. So we wait. It is still done and ready, still waiting for Kickstarter campaign, still being played from time to time, being tweaked and improved, some cards are in, some are out, you know the drill. It’s not dead, dammit!

So let’s look ahead to 2023. Even though we know exactly what is in the oven.

Plan A

Submachine Legacy. Finishing and releasing the game on Steam. Please remember that finishing all in-game puzzles is not the end of development. After that comes entire late-development phase, which includes adding all notes (yeah, I still haven’t decided how to display those, that’s why it’s pushed back to the later stage of development), creating intro, outro, cinematics between chapters, also let’s not forget entire sound design that I have to do with ThumpMonks on board. So there is still a lot of work to do. Be patient. I know you are. Be more patient. It will be worth it. I can’t wait either.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Plan minimum here is creating Kickstarter campaign and seeing what comes of it. Then plan and execute accordingly. I know, all I’m saying here is  sweet nothings, but hey. I’m neck deep in the Legacy and don’t think about this project that much. Some progress will be made here. Maybe.

Plan C

Blaki 5. Yes, a comic book. Would you believe it. I want to at least try to come back to the idea of drawing a comic book. Try to remember how to do it, at least begin painting that new album. At least try. You know, this entire album is already written and sketched out. All I have to do is draw and paint it. That’s all. So little, yet so much. Just try to begin. You can do this. One page. Maybe just one, single page for the new album. Is that too much? Let’s wait and see.

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Ok guys, enough of this pep talk. I just found out Heilung released new album, so I’m off to buy it and plaster it all over my eardrums while I figure out that insane Submachine 8 layering mechanic. Figuring new Submachine mechanics is tight!

See you in a year.

I hope.

art by Marina