Vatnsmyrkr【submarine exploration】

So a certain hero actually gave me a code for the game (they'll have to step up if they want the glory!) so I have it now, but haven't played it yet. Also won a copy of World to the West two days ago, and recently bought and played a bunch of Poi, so there's a lot to go through! At least I haven't got a Switch yet. o-o

Anyway, posting a small update since I'm not sure if I'll work more on this now and when I'll have time to next time!

UPDATE 88

Did a little bit of Unity prototyping to better illustrate and test out my 2.5D idea, with the sidescroller mechanics in a 3D environment. Helps me figure out the implementation quirks and whether this kind of gameplay even works before I potentially waste my time on working on a custom engine.

Basic 2.5D functionality

They say a picture says more than a thousand words, so here are a lot of pictures strung together into an animation:

To the left is a top-down view of the layout, and to the right is the actual game view, with the camera following the character around. Very speedy for the sake of the demonstration. Will probably be able to run in the final game, but this is definitely not going to be the default walking speed, heh…

So let's examine what's visible already in this GIF:

Sidescroller movement

Left and right. Up and down. In addition to slopes, there will be things to climb, gaps to jump across and ledges to hang off of. Standard stuff.

Right now all the paths between points are completely linear—although 90° angles are not enforced, as can be seen at the end of this map—but the system in theory supports things like curves as well, and I'd like to add those in the future to make paths more interesting (there are rounded paths like that in Pandemonium, for example). For instance, the character could be running up a tower, with the path circling around it.

So no use of the z axis between any two points. But then…

Multiple path choices

There's an alley in this GIF. The character first runs right past the blind alley, but on their way back turns into it, showing how the 3D space is still being used despite the otherwise two-dimensional movement.

So far, this demonstration only moves the character around automatically, and they've been preprogrammed to ignore the alley the first time and run into it the second time. Just to make sure that everything works well, no matter the chosen paths or the direction. I was not controlling the character here.

So the next issue to tackle will be how to make this movement and path choice feel natural. The idea right now is that the player will keep pressing left or right to stay on the current plane, but press up or down to turn on the 3D plane wherever possible. That one seems simple enough.

The bigger issue might be how to show the player where this is possible, so they don't get frustrated trying to press up or down where it doesn't work. HUD arrows are an obvious idea, but after some spitballing with Marte, and in line with my desires to keep UI minimalistic, and bearing in mind the expressive face of Link in Wind Waker, who automatically looks at points of interest, my idea right now is to have the character turn their head towards places where the player can turn. Marte reminded me that the game also has a submarine (oops), but I think perhaps I can add a periscope to it and have that turn.

Thoughts welcome!

Character ideas

Some time before I even posted the moodboard, I'd done a rough sketch of a character concept. I didn't post it because I thought maybe I could ask Marte to draw a better-looking version of them for me first, but the opportunity hasn't really presented itself, so here is my quick and dirty sketch anyway. This is just to demonstrate an important idea (gas mask), and in no way a finalised design.

You might remember that a big deal with the submarine was to conceal the character and not reveal any traits, to provide a blank slate for the player to connect with. This gets more difficult with the introduction of sequences on land. An initial idea I had was to keep the character entirely as an ambiguous silhouette, and I've posted a sketch of that before:

There are some difficulties with this due to my intended art style. I'll probably keep the character in the shadows a lot anyway, but there's one additional element added to the new design that allows for some more wiggle room: a gas mask. I realised that one of those would make a lot of sense due to the setting of the game, and it actually serves as the catalyst of a few new ideas, so there we go.

In other news

We did Ludum Dare again:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/blomst