Subaquatic Secrets

"Subaquatic Secrets is a[n] underwater exploration game, where you control a submersible through deep and vast oceans to discover dangers but also marvels of those deep oceans." - from the descripton of the game

Despite starting of this project with a seriously overscoped game concept we managed to get most of what we wanted in. In the large level there is a handful of puzzles that require the player to interact with certain objects to change their buoyancy or bringing key items from one location to another.

Favourite Feature

One of the many features from my first game project, the controllable robotic arm attached to the submarine has to be the thing that I like most out of the things I did in those 5 weeks.

As can be seen in the video to the right the claw of the arm can be moved freely within a certain distance from it's shoulder. I achieved this using inverse kinematics and verlet simulation. Here is a quick summary of the implementation:

The claw is moved through player input and the submarines speed, the joints of the arm are moved at the same speed and finally the distance between the joints are corrected.

This results in a set of 2 connected lines that connects the submarine to its hand.

Poster made by Ethan Johansson

Fear & Mischief

This game, previously named Hide & Snitch, is about children hiding or running from a monster in a haunted mansion. The core mechanics revolve around evading the monster and sabotaging for other players.

This project went quite well for its scope. Less than a handful of features were cut but the pandemic did definetly slow down the workflow. We needed to adapt to the uncertainty of whether or not some of us were coming to school or not and people being unable to deliver certain features in time.

I think we succeded in adapting to this challenge in the end through a more frequent use of Discord and communicating with eachother on a regular basis.

Iconic Item

During this project I was tasked with making the items and systems for using them.

Some of these Items could temporarily affected another players movement or sight, while others attracted the attention of the monster or could at one point in time even bring you back from death.

My favourite Item has to be the boxing glove gun. It simply stuns the player (preventing movement for a few seconds) on contact when used. It has a box collider childed to the wrist of the glove model that is active during a part of the animation. This is achieved using animation events. That collision box then has a stunning script that on contact with the player sets them as stunned for 3 seconds and triggers an animation on the player character.

Some Small and Smooth Math

I ended up rewriting some of the code for the circular main and pause menu in the second gameproject.

There was one issue with selecting different options where you could deselect the menu and another issue where the selection indicator would flicker between 3 of the 4 options when barely moving the left stick.

I solved these issues by taking the input from the left stick as a normalised 2d vector, which then gets dot multiplied with a normalised directional vector. The result of the product could then be used to tell if the input was within a certain angle of a directon.

This resulted in a smooth transition when switching between buttons and made selecting specific buttons a simpler task.

Shader for Flashlight Clipping on Collision

When we started baking our lights to improve the performance of the game, most of our real time lights stopped working, including the spotlight that was previously used for the flashlight.

I suggested using a shader to create a light cone and Linus made a shader that looks like the first preview image. I then added a set of nodes to that shader in the unity shader graph that would clip the model using a plane.

Player Animator

The responsibility of working with the animator for the players was given to me and while it took some iterations I think it turned out fine.

The player movement can be seen in the triangle of animation states Idle, Sneak and Run which are transitioned into depending on whether they are moving and if they are running.

Then there are certain states which are played from code which usually came in pairs as the animations were reused for multiple similiar actions that required different lengths of animation.

I also made the masks that were put in the different layers as certain animations like holding different Items only moved the right arm or the upperbody.

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