Hi! We'd like to tell a bit about our entry for LD48.

IDEA
Below the Tide is a game-experience where a vessel of an unknown origin explores the underwater world. The mechanics lie in moving through the suspended islands without hitting them in a search for safe landing spots. The goal is to go as deep as you can before the battery runs out. The hook of the game is in maneuvering between the obstacles while preserving as much energy as possible at the same time.

DEVELOPMENT
The gameplay development was all in Unity. Probably, the biggest chunk of the programming was in making the terrain for the never-ending underwater environment. The islands are generated in a procedural way by running the marching cubes algorithm on a signed distance field produced by 3D perlin noise. The mesh topology is generated on the fly and expands as you reach the level bounds, while the rest is being occluded for performance reasons. Using such noise as an input for level generation gives an almost unlimited freedom for controlling the shapes, density, roundness, fuzziness, blobiness etc of the islands. But it was (and is in post-mortem development) a challenge to get it work and look nice.

Below is the screenshot of the early work-in-progress, looking for a nice terrain variant.

One of the early decisions was to implement meshing to run on GPU using compute shaders, which worked out well in terms of performance (no loading screens), but unfortunately is not supported on WebGL at the moment. This resulted in the game only being available for the desktop platforms.

The shading was done using a custom-made set of shaders. The biggest problem was in making the terrain look as intended, basically, generating smooth-shaded normals on the procedural mesh. Because we had no time to polish the look of the generated islands — it would be easier to do if they were hand-made in Blender — we had to do some shading tricks to mask the imperfections of the terrain. Particularly, the psychedelic silky-smooth look of ‘charger’ islands didn’t work well with the marching cubes’ sharp normals.

WHAT WENT RIGHT
We finished the game that is playable and generally looks nice! Even though by the end of the jam the game was holding on sticks and a bubble-gum, we consider this an achievement.

WHAT WENT WRONG
There’s not much of the gameplay in Below the Tide in the Jam version. We have ideas on how to make the controls more interesting, but not sure if it’s worth pursuing.

What do you think? All feedback is very welcome!

https://youtu.be/I5-K_o1N6Is

Play + Rate:
itch.io
LD Jam entry