Undersea Racing

Community Showcases
1

I recently modeled a Sea Turtle on the Unity Artist forums. He’s actually the character for my upcoming small web game Undersea Racing. You can take him for a spin right now, in the following web player!

http://www.wanilla.net/random/undersea2/

CONTROLS:
• Spacebar - Swim
• Shift - Be Faster (must still hold space)
• Up/Down - Dive/Surface
• Left/Right - Turn left/right

MECHANICS (for the finished product):
• Oxygen - You and your opponents will need to breath at some point. Make sure you surface when you have a good opportunity.
• Stamina - As you swim your stamina will drain. You can swim faster at any time, at the cost of more stamina. Eating small fish around the track will give you a stamina boost.

2

Very cool. Once you get the hang of the controls, its pretty smooth. Can’t wait to see a game made out of this.

3

Well doing a race with as the main character a turtle does not sounds a good idea to me.

http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/3/Comcast-Slowskys-Stretch-692658.html

Maybe use some faster fish… it is a race, that means speed…

Another one…

4

Unless, it’s done like this…

A good start, but you definitely need to speed things up, at the moment it’s running a slow as a… er… turtle.

5

I love the turtle!

Just an idea: dont tie the particle emit to space bar, tie it to turtle’s speed. So that if he is going faster, more bubles. If he is slowing down, less bubles. And also dont stop emitting if user dont press space bar anymore :slight_smile:

6

@NickAVY - Good start. What your animation lacks is a sense of acceleration with each stroke and then some “glide” when it stops stroking before stopping.

@Nikko - The links you give are “tortoises”, what Nick has in his game is a “sea turtle”, different critters. Sea turtles are agile swimmers (considering their size and bulk) but not particularly fast. I used to swim with them all the time while snorkling in Hawaii. They can probably max out at 5 or 6 knots if they really want to (just a guess). Of course this is a game and Nick can make them swim as fast (or slow) as he wants. :slight_smile:

7

Thanks everybody, great ideas for particles and other things. I’ve already ratcheted up the speed in the editor, and added a button to swim faster on command, which makes it seem very fast and fun. I’ll let you guys know when I have some updates!

8

Today’s Changelog:
• Added oxygen and makeshift oxygen HUD element
• Added a water’s surface, and allowed for surfacing
• Bump-mapped the turtle’s shell
• Edited the turtle’s swimming animation as per Kahuna’s suggestion

9

Cute turtle!

One thing I noticed is that holding down Up-arrow and left-arrow at the same time didn’t allow me to go left AND dive, only one or the other. However, Up-arrow and right-arrow works.

Keep up the good work.

10

Looks very interesting and likea good start.

If you don’t mind, I would like to offer a few ideas to add more to the illusion:

  1. To give a better feel of water movement (and especially speed), I would add a box based particle emitter that is put in as child to your cam or the turtle which spawns a fair amount of “plancton particles” that don’t move (or move based on some stream) and “bubble particles” that move upwards.

  2. I would potentially also look into ways to use fog planes / fog particles to give a feeling for missing view distance. The hardware fog is a bit troublesome as only geometry is affected, so in cases where there is no geometry behind, there it will end with a pretty wrong illusion.

11

Isn’t that exactly what the shader replacement techniques are supposed to allow? Distance blurring I mean…

12

Thats true
But it requires Unity Pro as well as a bit more capable hardware than for example what apple used till this years refresh on macbook and mac mini

13

Running out of oxygen is complete. When you run out of oxygen your turtle will stop racing and surface for air. You won’t be able to start racing again until you have 100% oxygen restored.

If you’re racing along the bottom when this happens, it can be a serious blow to your time, so make sure you take a breather every now and then.

14

adorable ^^

15

Very interesting game definitely unique.

16

http://www.wanilla.net/random/undersea2/

I uploaded a new player. I think you’ll really enjoy this build. I also tried to spiff up the surrounding web page.

EDIT: Uh, that page’ll look best at a resolution of around 1440x900. Any larger and it’ll have white borders, smaller and it’ll be all squishedy. It’s my first time trying to make a fancy web page, so forgive me. :stuck_out_tongue:

17

Nice!

But I think there is an issue with the fact you need to take oxygen.

I ended up finishing the race the camera out of the water to avoid having to go down and up all the time…

But maybe you will oblige the player to go deep into the water? I hope otherwise to finish the game it is better to not be underwater.

18

Not bad. Everything could be a little faster if it’s going to be a racing game. While boosting the turning should be tighter as well.

“Hey, this works!”

19

Looking better! As I played with this I got an idea to make the game a bit more challenging. How about adding some animated, dense vegetation (kelp, eel grass), with a labyrinth (maze) of clear routes? If the turtle is in the vegetation his speed slows, so the challenge would be to find a path through the cleared labyrinth.

20

I was attempting to add some kelp just for a visual effect earlier, but a kelp forest sounds like it could be cool for a different track. Another thing I’m intending to add are forward and backward flowing currents.