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[GainDeveloper]

A local play competitive submarine shooter!

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Hey!
Me and a buddy have been working on this little submarine couch game for a few months, I thought it would be worth sharing some of the progress we've made
Here's where we are now,





We also did a mockup of the art style,



Will try to post an update each month or so!

[Anton]

Hum, interesting.
I'd expect a slower gamespeed though since those are submarine.

[Bombini]

The mockup looks nice!

[GainDeveloper]

Thanks guys!
Regarding game speed, we are definitely leaning more on arcade than strategy, so fast paced feels right at the moment - but who knows where we will go !







We've made lots of progress since the last post, but there's still so much for us to explore and try out, both in terms of gameplay and art.
It's difficult to always remember to do these updates, hopefully next time will be with two players!

 

[Snö]

Hey!
I am the other part of this project
Another update... more art stuff, trying out some shapes. Lots to iterate yet.

[GainDeveloper]

Trying to keep this up to date!
Recently started reworking the torpedo physics, adding initial boosts when you fire and adding a more gradual turning to the torpedo when they reach their apex. Also implemented another of our abilities, the deflection air shield which bounces the torpedo back at a stronger velocity.



Also took some time to go through things with Snö and pick a direction to take things in next. I'm super excited about what we are doing next and look forward to updating you guys soon!

[GainDeveloper]

Still working hard on this after a few months of contemplation!
Initially I envisioned the game being tactical, with players aiming shots precisely and dodging/ blocking based on hairpin timing. This wasn't fun in practice.

Finding the fun (literally)
Forgetting the combat for a moment, our controls feel snappy and still allow for that tight dodging. Building on that, we need to give the player a rewarding reason to move around and explore the environment.

Extended Level Bounds
Previously we had a fixed camera with player scrolling. This had to go to make room for more environments.
A dynamic camera that fitted with the players seems like the obvious choice right now. It'll allow for players to separate while exploring/ recovering and bring the camera in close during action.

Mapped players position directly to a bounding box, added a fixed minimum height to control min zoom and finally added additional fixed padding.

This was a good start, but we needed new ways to block the player and camera as we no longer had the scrolling. I added a simple clipping plane at the bottom to control how far down the camera could go, this actually had a (pleasant) side effect I'll discus later.
For the other sides of the level I introduced a 'current barrier' this gracefully pushes back the player whilst letting the player retain control.

Clipping plane and current barriers.

With some simple camera size/ position lerping and basic maths to ensure the camera would fit correctly we got some decent results at both extremes. We now just need to play with the size of the playable space and see how far we can push it while maintaining readability on the players.

A cool unexpected bonus that came with the clipping plane, by moving the clip plane and ignoring the players, we get a 'free' animated camera for using between rounds (more on that some other time). Along with the slowmo and faded UI I think this can be quite nice!
For future improvements I think the padding could be based on player direction and velocity, to ensure more of where the player is heading is visible. For now this works though.

With the level opened up this gives us many more opportunities to do interesting things, the following I'd like to write about in following posts

Level Hazards (may or may not contain sharks)
Fixed Pickups
Level Environments

[GainDeveloper]

Another few months have quickly flown by!
Since the last post we had another play test and is still felt like the combat wasn't much fun. I think this came down to the 'resource management' aspect of ammunition and air (used for abilities) slowing down the game.
So we removed ammunition and instead added a charging system to both the torpedo's and the harpoon.

Charging the harpoon will make it shoot further and give you an aiming reticle.

Charging the torpedo's will load more that fire in a semi-random shotgun-esque spread

We're yet to playtest with these changes but I'm hoping they will give them player some more options in how to fight.
I still don't think it's very easy to aim in this game, especially over longer distances. I'm hesitant to add any sort of auto aim, anyone have any experience or advice on side scroller aiming when using a controller?

[GainDeveloper]

I've also been working on making the pickups require more player input.
Keeping in mind a piece of advice I heard a few weeks ago about making sure the computer wasn't having more fun than the players. This held true with the previous pickups.

Normal pickups are caged in debris. They can be shot of with the harpoon or charged into.

Powerups are held inside debris the player must swim inside, making an easy target for other players.

Keep in mind all the art is still very much temporary, just making sure the mechanics are fun before putting too much time into these

[GainDeveloper]

I realize I haven't done a very good job explaining the game in any of these posts but hopefully we'll be able to record a video of a gameplay session some time soon.

Mutations
At the end of each round the player gets to pick from a bunch of semi-random 'mutations'. The mutations will cost a certain number of Neutrons, the player gets these from environmental pickups or from winning the previous round.
The most of expensive mutations should obviously be the most game changing so I've started working on some of these.

Grappling Harpoon!

The Grappling Harpoon mutation changes your standard harpoon into being able to grab and pull all physics objects in the game.
This ended up being a lot more fun than I anticipated and works nicely with both the pickups and hazards in the game.

Hopefully it's not too overpowered 

[GainDeveloper]

We had our first playtest for a couple of months last week. It was fun! It's taken a while to get the combat to click but for the first time we really enjoyed the game. There's still so much to do and make more intuitive but it's great to have a first step in the right direction!

One thing we discussed is to give a bit more control to the harpoons and torpedos so the player can be a bit more tactical.
We came up with 'boosts', the player presses the bumper buttons to boost the active projectile.
Id did some quick initial tests on these,

Trigger Torpedo Explosion

Cluster Bomb Torpedo!

Lock On Torpedo!

Again no polish with art but we will playtest again soon and see if they work in practice.
Hopefully upload a public build sometime soon - just want to get in more player feedback first

[GainDeveloper]

Making slow but certain progress
I finally added a main menu to the game, it's extremely simple, allowing players to join the game and maneuver around a little before starting the game. It was silly to leave this so late, ended up having many issues with order of initialization as scenes unloaded/ loaded.
Also added feedback for the amount of air the player has with the light.

Main Menu


Player Light Animation

We're almost ready to have our first proper playtest, we just need to make some tweaks to the mutation picking UI and get in some feedback for player health.

[Snö]

Hey guys, some art update:

sandbanks added:


Mines models are in


Also Torpedoes color coding for each tipe


Trying to figure out Submarine shape and one of the enemies


Nucleons first iteration

[I_smell]

Very nice work! I can't tell, is this a co-op adventure or are you fighting against each other?

Sorry if this is bad feedback, but I do like the chubby capsule submarines a bit more than the new ones. They had a very friendly, bumbling personality about them that I feel like would reflect my own state of mind as I wade into the game's features for the first time.

[Snö]

Very nice work! I can't tell, is this a co-op adventure or are you fighting against each other?

Sorry if this is bad feedback, but I do like the chubby capsule submarines a bit more than the new ones. They had a very friendly, bumbling personality about them that I feel like would reflect my own state of mind as I wade into the game's features for the first time.

Hey, thanks for the comment and feedback.
Its a player vs player vs environment, so you mainly fight each other but enemies around the level can damage you.

We still in the process of figuring out shapes for the subs, come and goes on more base shapes or more personallity but also readibility...so not a final design yet. But your feedback is appreciated
Thanks!

[GainDeveloper]

Took some time off over the past few weeks but still made some progress adding sealife!
Sea life will be an integral part of Turpedo, as mutated fish guts or 'Nucleons' are our deep sea currency. Nucleons allow you to upgrade your submarine each round, so it was important there was a little skill required to get them!

Tentacle (Slippery Sea Noodle)


Barracuda

Will be adding the 'Abyssal Monster' next. Our largest sea creature that will come into the play space every now and then

[Snö]

Hey there! Small update!
Been doin some work on the UI

Help menu


Upgrade cards



Also a render of our barracudas!

Hope you like it!
Cheers

[GainDeveloper]

Fish Animation
It's time to finally get those rigid fish boards animating! I saw this video about Abzu's fish animation that inspired me to get stuck into it.
So quick demonstration of everything wrong with the previous animation and movement of the fish,

• No fin movement to match velocity/ speed.
• They turn on the spot and change direction instantly.
• Feel very rigid and lack any deformation.

Attempt 1 : Rigged Physics
I took what seemed like the easiest method first. Rig the fish, use unity's hinge joints to connect the different joints and let springs & motors do the rest. It was fast to implement but not quite right..

The flapping of the fin wasn't right at all, after some research into how fishes actually move it was clear that simple physics wasn't going to give enough control.
I was also concerned with performance, this was 3 joints, and with around 20 fishes in play at once it seemed unreasonable for something so small.

Attempt 2 : Blend Targets
As they did in Abzu, it made sense to try out some blend shapes to give control over specific poses. I made 2 morph targets for each fin direction (Unfortunately Unity doesn't support scaling a blend shape out of a 0-100 range yet)
I decided to also make morphs for the bending/ deformation. I tried to imagine these as how the fish would look if it quickly turned and faced a different direction. These were hard to preview with the rotation but with some iterations I had the following,

This worked nicely but unfortunately, as you can see from the side shot, the fish animation is barely noticeable from the side and had to be exaggerated somewhat to work. I don't entirely have a solution for this but I might look at exaggerating the tail flip a little more.

Movement
Before putting this altogether in the game I wanted to change the way the fishes moved.
Previously I just naively pushed the fish around and had it face its velocity.
I changed this to having the fish always move in a forward direction and focus on how the fish rotates.
I mapped the fishes rotation speed and fin animation speed to the velocity and calculate a 'back angle' for applying to the bend morph.

Chasing the mouse at 3 different speeds.

To get this to work appropriately in game it needed to be controlled by the fishes ai, flocking and avoidance/dodging.
I decided on a priority based system where flocking is disabled in certain situations. It isn't ideal though and you'll see some erratic behavior sometimes as the different systems try to change the direction. However it feels rather natural and some randomness is needed.

Gentle Fish                                               Less Gentle Fish

I'm happy with the result, especially considering it is very easy to adjust and author new poses for any new fishes we have in the future.
Let us know what you think!

[Snö]

We have a logo!

[HiddenNatureDsn]

Coming together nicely.  I love underwater stuff, and arcade action, so it's a good mix for my taste.