Infinite Ocean Beta

Community Showcases
1

Hello,
Over the last few months my friend and I made this underwater game, Infinite Ocean. This is just the beta version, but it shows the art and the gameplay pretty well.

The game’s primary feature is a procedural environment generator based on Perlin Noise. You can go left or right infinite in any direction and there will always be new ocean to explore.

To get more air bubbles, find treasures and bring them to your dolphin friends!

Try swimming deep, too, as there’s a whole underground environment!

Please post feedback! There’s a lot of things I want to fix but I had to release it today to get class credit. I’m developing this for mobile, but I don’t currently have to funds to publish it.

UPDATES:
Most Recent: http://becksebenius.com/#infiniteocean

2

This is really nice and the procedurally generated ocean environment is consistent and believable. I would like to invest more time as a player but the mouse movement seemed a bit frustrating. I wasn’t sure how exactly the movement corresponded to the mouse movement. Everything else appeared to be good including performance on my end.

I also noticed the dynamic pitches in music to set the mood of urgency. Well done!

3

Thanks for the response :slight_smile: The movement system was built to correspond with a finger wiping across a touchscreen, so it follows that it might be odd with a mouse. It’s most effective when you swipe in the direction you want to move

4

The jumping out of water reminds me of echo the dolphin on sega! lol

Nice job

5

Instruction seems to be a big problem at this point so I’ve updated the game to include a (very) basic instruction panel at the top.

Thanks for your comment Xeno360, Ecco was a big inspiration for this game!

6

Critique:

Stuff I liked: Art style is great, all-ages friendly and gentle; I can see a lot of work was put into getting it to the spec wanted, and the procedural levels are cool. And the dolphin jumps are fun.

Stuff that could be improved:

Use light. Even without realtime shadows, it should be possible to play with light. Try a quad overlay that feeds in color values and transparency depending on depth, to make it darker / more blue as you dive, better yet, use a directional light from above, but alter the shader to gradually darken / add blue depending on the character depth.

Needs more little bubbles.

The bubbles for air supply shake even if they’re not about to run out. It’s distracting, and doesn’t serve as a good visual cue atm.

Timer for air keeps ticking when the dolphins are doing their tricks and locking out the camera; nearly ran out of air once because of this.

Capturing the treasure is needlessly over-complicated, imo; set the treasure to follow the player if you simply open the treasure box, it shouldn’t take another (finicky) click.

Right now the controls are very awkward on the web demo, and I found myself wanting it to just attempt to follow the cursor. The turtle also seems to get hung up on obstacles a lot, leading to strange and jerky movement.

The timing on the dives seems a bit short, and there’s nothing that adds replay value or a sense of character development atm; needs some power-ups or RPG-esque character development and a scoring system.

I also think it would really benefit from having more emotional context; we’re a turtle, we’re bringing gold to dolphins… but why? I don’t mind a game where the only real conflict is with the timer, but I like it when a game has a sense of being on the journey for a reason; right now, after seeing the fish and coral for a few minutes and capping a treasure, I’ve pretty much seen what the game offers atm.

7

Beautiful setting I really like it. My main criticism though are the controls. I’d put wasd movement controls in there else it’s way too frustrating. I guess I could see the click control for finger on an iPad etc… but in the web browser it’s frustrating.

8

Interesting idea and very nice visuals… But yeah controls are the issue…

9

Thanks for your replies!

@psyclone retrecht: Yeah the controls are a bit sticky on the web player. It’s frustrating that I had to do an early release on a different platform, but that’s unfortunately that stems from the need to get credit for the class. I’ve tested the movement system relentlessly on the phone, but it just doesn’t seem to translate very well to the web. I may update the web version with a modification to the system however so that it’s not so clunky.

@xenoargh: Thanks for the breakdown! I especially take a lot of weight into your criticism with the player reward. The meta game wasn’t really nailed out until very late in the process and hasn’t undergone a lot of testing. My hope was that I will be able to tweak it more to enable a more rewarding experience, although it’s not unlikely that there will be some pretty broad changes to how the system works.

I’ll keep this thread updated with future releases!

10

Great, feel free to PM me if you want me to test it again to give further feedback. It has a lot of potential, the art style’s very engaging :slight_smile:

11

On and off I’ve still been working on this game. Here’s an update, for anyone whose interested! http://becksebenius.com/#infiniteocean

12

Hey Beck, first of all, I really liked the game, and secondly, could you give me some tips about learning Perlin Noise? I have been trying to figure it out for about a week now, and can’t seem to get anything to work. I really appreciate any help you can give me, Gibson

13

This game is quite nicely done, and very pretty to look at.
It is not the type of game I normally like; however, I found it enjoyable.

The controls took a bit of getting used to; but before long, I was swooping through the ocean at high speed.

I think you need to add some more things to do, more complications in the game.
Maybe also some sort of air bubble zones, to refill your air supply, distributed around the caves, to promote deep cave spelunking?

14

Thanks GBStudios. Well, Perlin noise is actually a pretty simple concept. It’s pretty much smoothed noise, so that when you give it two coordinates in proximity, you can guess that they’ll likely give results that are next to each other. When you put this into two or three dimensions, this means that you get large masses of similar values, which you can wrangle into whatever you like. I find Perlin noise to be really useful for terrain (like in this game) and also for item placement where you’d like similar items to be placed next to each other. Something I’m currently working on for this game is Biome definitions using Perlin noise.
Now, for actually learning it, I’d recommend checking out the procedural examples on the Unity website. They give you a base class that you can use to get started with Perlin noise, as well as a couple examples of how it might be used. They’re pretty novel, but they might spark some ideas for how to use it. One problem you’ll probably run into: that class doesn’t support defining a seed for your perlin noise, so you’ll probably end up getting a random result every time. If you’re looking for consistent results (AKA, sending the same values will yield the same result), you need to modify it to accommodate that. Check out this thread, where I tried to solve that problem. If you have any questions feel free to email me!

Thanks, Tasarran. I’m glad you enjoyed it, especially if it’s outside of your typical genre. My big push on this game is to have it really easy to understand and control, no matter what kind of gamer you are. I definitely agree with you that there is some lacking gameplay, and that’s something I’m currently working to remedy. I have in the works several new enemies, an inventory/equipment system, and achievements. I like your idea about air bubble zones! This might be something I’ll test out in the future.

15

Loved this, though I hate sharks…

Saw one and it scared the crap out of me :slight_smile:

gj on this.

16

Hey, this is really neat.

A few comments.

Since one of your main gameplay features is “Infinite Ocean”, I’d rather explore than have to panic to find air every 5 minutes.

Maybe add an explore mode with infinite air?

Or at least increase the air level.

Anyway, awesome kid-friendly game. Keep up the good work.

On an other note, would it be possible to make this generator work on all three axes?

17

I’m glad that you enjoyed it! Yeah the sharks are always pretty jolting to people, but I rather like that. They’ve been an area of tweaking for a long time though, with both their size and general mechanics. I’m trying to push them as more of a nuisance than anything, since they don’t really obstruct your goals but rather delay it.

Thanks for the comments! I agree with you that the air level can be kind of annoying, especially if you really just want to explore around. One thing I’ve been doing to fix this is adding a simple inventory system (in my current build you can hold up to 12 items, but I’ll be tweaking this). The treasure chests will still give you a simple gold reward, but you will also have the chance of getting items which boost your stats - including the amount of air you can hold. I want the player to start off just being able to explore the tops of the caverns, and then as they play longer they should be able to go deeper and deeper (encountering new, more dangerous gameplay - more on that later). Hopefully that will solve the issue you’re talking about - only time will tell, though!

As far as getting the generator to work on three axes, it already does in a way. You’ll notice that there are three layers of meshes being generated, even if you can only interact with the first one. I can scale this to as many as I want, but for both performance and just visual simplicity three layers seems to work best.
Anything beyond that I think would break the 2-dimensional gameplay, and would probably warrant another system and game entirely. The concept would essentially turn into procedural voxels (run-time minecraft?) and I’ve already been poking at the concept. I haven’t made a ton of headway, but maybe I’ll have something to show in the future!