I said I would create a post to introduce my current game project and I'm finally getting around to it. My new game is called Undersea, and it's my take on the space sim adventure genre but with an underwater setting.
I don't intend to simulate submarines in a super by-the-books way, so I guess it's kind of a fantasy setting. I call it a space sim because the submarines really function more like space ships than real submarines, which on the whole are mostly boring tube shapes in real life.
The main gameplay I think will be exploring the world, upgrading your vessel + acquiring new ones and participating in the various story arcs. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from games like Escape Velocity, Freelancer, STALKER, and Zelda: TOTK.
Rather than using procedural generation to build the world like in Sail Forth, this time I plan to hand-author the world as a single open-world map. I'll still likely use a lot of proc gen stuff to place small details like vegetation but the broad strokes will be all bespoke. I think this is going to allow me to create a lot more memorable locations which is something I felt was missing in Sail Forth!
Similar to Sail Forth, the vast majority of the game is based around piloting your vessel through the world. You have direct control of its motion and have an orbit camera to look around with. In addition to the 3rd person view I'm also experimenting with an in-cockpit first person view!
Combat is going to be a big part of the game so I'm putting a lot of effort into designing interesting mechanics around it. The submarines are fully customizable with different equipment which can greatly affect the way you engage with enemies, such as using homing torpedos, launching autonomous drones, jammers and other electronic warfare, or just plain old projectile weapons.
Exploration is another big part of the game; I intend to put a lot of little caves and secrets for players to discover throughout the world. I think it's going to be a lot of fun to pick a corner of the map and add detail to it during development!
So far I think the game takes place in the same universe as Sail Forth, with some kind of large time skip to explain the more futuristic stuff going on. You can expect to see a lot of returning factions from Sail Forth, along with some new ones!
The world map is comprised of the sea floor, along with a ton of floating island type things and various other debris and structures to fill the vertical space. Filling the vertical space I think is going to be one of the bigger challenges in the world design.
Who knows! It's probably going to take a while, it's a big game. The upside is that with my experience making Sail Forth I've been making a lot faster progress towards something playable with less design meandering (but still some healthy design meandering 😊).
Now that I've finally written an intro post about the game I feel like it'll be easier to throw up quick devlog posts about it! I didn't want to do that until I'd at least given some initial context about the project.
Thanks for reading!