Summary

Game Project 1 at PlaygoundSquad by a group of 10 students consisting of designers, artists and programmers.

Subaquatic Secrets is a underwater exploration game, where you control a submersible through deep and vast oceans to discover dangers but also marvels of those deep oceans. The game has tasks that guide the player through the level, but you as the player will have to find your own way to the objectives. This is to emphasize the exploration and non-restrictiveness of the levels.

Unfortunately, we were only able to make one big level during our 5 weeks. But we are proud of this one level, though we would have liked to add many more features.

Main contributions:

Player and camera movement

We wanted our movement to be heavily physics based to make the traversal of the levels more challenging and get the feel of being underwater by having a longer slowdown when releasing the controls.

Player collision and damage

Since we wanted physics based movement we also needed realistic collision that reflects the vecolity of the player depending on both speed and angle with the environment, but not too realistic since we wanted the walls to bounce the player away from them and not slide against them taking constant damage. Since TenGine doesn't have physics based collision built in we had to solve this by making our own reflection vectors and the like.

Pinging mechanic

The pinging is used to help the player find their way in our maze-like environment. The player sends out a ping, then the active pingable objects respond at different times depending on their distance to the player.

Trigger/story system

Since the game allows the player to find their own way through the level we needed a story system that could adapt to this. If the player took a shortcut the story triggers would activate/deactivate accordingly and this took some thinking to figure out how to solve but I ended up with a system that worked something like this: All story events are sorted in a list. Every item has references to other list items that they will activate once triggerd. This way we can jump over some unnecesary text triggers if the player takes another path in the level. But once an item is activated it will be active until the player interracts with it, that way all of the story can be discovered what ever way the player progresses through the world.

Audio

Using and implementing the FMOD API with TenGine proved a challenging but fun experience. The music in the game is added to playlists that play depending where the player is on the map. Unfortunately we didn't have time to create enough music to be able to make use of this functionality.