Our infinite ocean.

This post will dive in to the thoughts and decision making behind my team finally deciding on create an infinite level for our game.

In the Concept document my team and I picked the high concept says:
“You are an adventurer attempting to navigate a boat through a thick fog on a journey to find a mysterious entity.”
According to the document the idea was then to let the player move in all directions but that the level would scroll from the top. After reading this the team quickly agreed that the game would not give the player the feeling of Adventuring, in the sense of being in control of a ship on the open ocean but not being allowed to go anywhere but up.

We first played around with the idea of having a tiled map, where the player would always start on at the island in the center and then be able to move around freely to find the monster. The tiles around would be prefabs and randomly placed they would contain different environments so the player would not be able to find the monster in the same position when playing the game several times, The idea behind this was both encourage the aesthetic of mystery and add replayability to the game.

However, even though this idea would help to not break the illusion on being on the open ocean, the player would still eventually run into the border of the map if they choose to travel in one direction without turning. The team also agreed that this approach ran the risk of creating way to much work in designing all the different tiles, especially when it never really solved our issue with having the map end.

After some more discussion and hard work from our programmer Kentaro Hayashida we find our current solution to the problem, an infinite ocean in all directions.

The top picture shows what in looks like in unity and the bottom picture shows what the player is seeing when playing. Even tough the underlying mechanic only looks like a square ocean with edges in the picture, when running it keeps generating and creating the dynamics and feeling of an infinite ocean. It also gives the same amount of replayability and if the team has time we have the option to add the mechanic of spawning in islands and other environments.

This solution does not however come without its own problems. Even if we want the player to feel lost in the fog on the open ocean, we don’t actually want the player to feel so lost that they have zero information on where to go and eventually lose interest and leave the game. To counteract this we are giving the player an objective to collect clues with the help of a compass. The compass will point in the general direction of the next clue so the player has some idea of where to go, after collecting x amount of clues the game will then spawn in the boss. And if the player travels in the opposite direction of what the compass indicating, the clue will spawn closer without the player noticing. For example if the clue is to the players right but the player travels to the left for 1 hour, when the player eventually turn around they will reach the clue in no time.
This is our way and solution to not punish the player for wanting to explore the world.

About Vidar Grönros

2017 Project Management

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