2048 - Underwater Editon

2048 Underwater Edition, is a "remake" of the game 2048, with exactly the same mechanics, but set in an underwater scene(see more here).

This is a student project we had to make for a programming class. The goal of the exercise was to remake the game 2048 from scratch, and make it more juicy by adding visual and audible feedback, and giving it a bit of our personnality.

I started by coding the game as it is known, with the tiles movement and fusion mechanics. Once that part was over, the fun began. I chose an underwater theme to set a scene and have some coherence between all the visual and audio feedback I was going to make.

For that, I started by making the 3D models and textures for the tiles (the shells). Then, I hopped onto Substance Designer, and made that sand background that gives some depths to the scene. 

The project is made in Unity 2021 HDRP, so it feels like there's height variation because there is. Since I have a static scene with only a few 3D objects and visual effects, I didn't encounter performances problems. It allowed me to made the background with high definition and tesselation.

Then I went to the biggest part of the exercise, the feedback.

Since the scene is underwater, my idea was that the tiles would make the sand budge when moving. I made a simple particle system with circle particles moving with the tiles. 

As for the fusion, the bubbles came naturally, so I made a Shader Graph for transparent bubbles, with a bit of distortion and a color parameter to be able to give it some variation. This gave me the material to assign to the bubbles particles you can see below.

After a bit of testing and polishing these, I realised there wasn't a nice understanding of the movement of the tiles, so I made a current-like particle system that gives feedbacks to the player as to what direction he made the tiles move.

Finally, to give more life to the scene, and some interactivity, made a bubble transition that would be played when starting a game, and a floating dust-like effect so that the scene isn't still.

Last part of the feedbacks and polish I had to add was the sound : I did some research and found some bubble sounds that I modified using reaper, and added a Royalty free music that fitted the atmosphere (Watermusic II by William Basinski).

When I was satisfied with it all, I integrated all of it together, and finished by making the menus. 

2048 - Underwater Edition is a project that helped me better my mastery of Shader Graph and Shuriken.

I experimented on Particle Systems blocks that I had never used before, and also undertood better how to use some of Shader Graph nodes.

As I said in the breakdown, I used Substance Designer to make the background's sand material. For that, I mainly followed a tutorial video I found, but it made me try seriously the software for the first time, and I have now a better understanding of how to design materials in this software.