Feedback on Ocean Demo / Game

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#1

TL;DR at bottom

Over the past few days, I’ve been working on a simple demo for a larger game, and now I’m finally ready to take it a step further. The demo is about you (or maybe a few other people) going on a boat to research the deep sea, which you do by lowering down a camera and viewing it on a monitor. What I have right now is very bare bones, no real UI or HUD, basic movement, no sailing, anchoring, or lowering down the camera animations or actions, just the basic concept and a few added features.

I’m currently at a stand-still in development where I don’t know which direction I want to take this game in. On one hand, I can turn it into an awesome campaign-y progression based singleplayer game that focuses less on exploration but more on improving inside of the game. And on the other hand, I could turn it into a fun multiplayer game about exploration and hanging out with your friend together on a boat while discovering cool creatures.

I want your guys’ opinions on what I should do with this game, since I’m not very sure myself. If you have something to say in the comments after playing this game, please share it. I will take all criticism seriously, and I will try my best to improve the game, thank you.

Eye of The Sea - Roblox

Controls in the description

I will be making another topic when I eventually give this game a gameplay loop, which all depends on what I make this game into.

TL;DR:
I made a game demo about the deep-sea, and now I want to turn it into a full game, but I don’t know if it should be multiplayer or singleplayer focused.

Update:

  • Added in Ranks, which will allow for organized expeditions later in development.
  • Fixed the awful lighting.

Final update of this topic:

  • Started work on a better way to spawn in boats, and soon you’ll need to be a Captain in order to spawn in a boat to use.

  • Gave the underwater portion a brighter color, going from rgb(0, 0, 70) to rgb(0, 0, 85) to better match the game’s aesthetic.

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#2

I’m not sure if anyone managed to get to the actual point of the game since I didn’t give any instructions, but basically you go to the boat, use the steering wheel to set sail, then click on the monitor to view the underwater camera.

I’ll be sure to attach a video on the next topic I make about this game.

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#3

A friend and I tried this out! They said it reminded them of Aquanaut’s Holiday (1996) with the goal not being horror game but a science exploration game. (When you bump into animals, they make sounds).

Your current prototype has an interesting setting. The underwater camera currently gives a bit of a “horror” vibe with the darkness and the graininess. My friend and I stayed on the camera for a bit, but we didn’t find any animals so I’m not sure if they were in this prototype. I did notice that I was a little afraid of staring at the camera though. Since the camera can’t move and can only rotate, I thought that something was going to jump out at me so I felt nervous and had to turn off the camera. Currently I’m wondering if you’re aiming for a horror vibe or a curiosity vibe with the final game.

When it comes to figuring out what your final gameplay loop will be, or if the game will be singleplayer or multiplayer first, I think you need a few more prototypes before determining this. But also, even if you do a campaign game, this doesn’t seem like the type of game that would be hurt if you allowed the campaign to have optional multiplayer in some way (i.e. different boats or simply multiple cameras) since there doesn’t seem to be any obstructions in multiplayer.

For consideration, in later prototypes, I think you might want to test the feeling of actually finding some sea creatures more to see if it does feel scary, or if it feels more curious and casual. If it’s able to feel like both, that’s also a good thing, because that means you can use the feeling of the camera to your advantage if you decide to go the campaign route (you can surprise players by tasking them to find smaller creatures, but then they end up finding huge creatures that literally rock the boat).

I think it’d also be interesting to prototype the feeling of the boat. If the camera can’t move, do you plan for the boat to move? Since one of your inspirations is Iron Lung, I’m assuming that the boat having vehicle controls is your intent. The sea creatures in the game affecting both the camera and the boat would be interesting to experiment with. Then, in multiplayer, perhaps you can have one person driving the boat while another person is controlling the camera, as an example.

As a final note, I’m not sure why the prototype has sprinting and crouching controls since the important parts of the game don’t seem to be on-foot travel. If traveling on-foot isn’t super important, I suggest removing sprinting and couching. If you do plan for on-foot travel, for example, players need to make repairs for the boat in case something goes wrong, or if there are planned to be large boats, then maybe you can use it.

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#4

I’ll just respond to your post in a random and unorganized way. Kind of just rambling about what changed from the creation of this topic.

Since I posted this 6 hours ago, I’ve had some time to come up with some ideas for the direction of this game. I’m thinking a game where someone requests for an expedition, with them being the captain, and other crew members would help the voyage.

I developed the camera long before the map, and the camera has stayed the same since. I do think that the camera feels too earie for a game with such simple and bright graphics, so I’ll probably change that.

The weird controls are just to make the game feel more substantial, and less slow. Even after I changed the default walk speed to 18 rather than 16, walking from the spawn to the boat takes way too long. Crouching was just something easy to add, so I did.

When I first showed the original camera demo to my friends, they all found it a bit unnerving, with some of them saying it reminded them of Iron Lung, which I agreed. If you look on the boat model once you’ve set sail, you can the anchor under the water, and I’ll probably keep it like this since the way the camera works makes it really hard for it to be moved, almost impossible with the current scope of the game. Iron was kind of added as a tag of sorts, since I don’t think there are many games with a feel such as that

As for animals, there “is” a Goblin Shark that is so far away that you cannot see it with all the affects. I could only spot it with the fog and camera affects disabled, and even then it was a few pixels. It does move around a little bit though. I will add a lot more creatures that will roam the waters, but I don’t want it to feel like a coral reef with tons of animals, I want there to be a few, sparce creatures that feel unique.

Bigfin Squid - YouTube

Alien looking creature transforming near Ocean floor at over 3700 feet.Video from ROV - YouTube

The video of the Big fin squid was the original concept for the game, and the second video is probably what it’ll eventually look like.

Random Idea I thought of: Camera drift would be cool.

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#5

OK, I think this works. These are great reference materials. I was wondering what you mean by “camera drift”?

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#6

In the second video I showed, you can see that the camera slowly moves down to the right because of the ocean currents. That is what I mean by “camera drift”.

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