Below Deck

Utilising Unreal's Buoyuancy Plugin - much of Below Deck is set aboard Gideon Bray's boat. It's a dynamically movable Actor with a variety of functions, including:

Displayed fully via dials in game is the ship's fuel, current throttle amount, steering direction and also 'Brinemother Danger Level.'

The movement of the ship's waterwheels is directly tied to the directional input, meaning the waterwheels move as they would on a real boat.

Objects like doors with their own interaction surfaces to keep the game as immersive as possible. 

Special code to induce/reduce sliding effects on other Actors within the cargobay.

For future build purposes, there is a random resource cargo box generation system. Players can find boxes containing 5-35 of Wood, Scrap or Oil, each valued differently at shops.

Oil can be directly stored in the ship to refuel.

In this early build of the game - the Brinemother is the main threat. Some sort of massive tentacled monster that can detect the player when they spend too much time away from land, or outside of the safety Buoys. 

Using some primitive tentacles modelled and quickly animated by other team members, I created the systems and ingame implementation of the Brinemother death mechanic.

I would love to rework this to make the Brinemother a physical entity that actually roams the map and hunts the player down, but that was beyond the scope of our initial Prototype.

Below Deck is a highly atmospheric experience, so beyond the visual effects, I sought out integrating binaural localised audio for environments in the game. 

With SFX sourced from Freesound.org and Pixabay, I tweaked and created a variety of 3D sound effects.

Watch the video with headphones!