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[Moogie]

I have a little game project I'm playing around with, which I'll probably never finish, but for the time being I'm having fun with it. It would be set in a 2D, side-on underwater environment.

I'm having problems visualising how I'd make such a vast and empty environment... well, interesting. And not disorienting. There's the seabed, and the surface, but then you have this giant empty area in between where all the player will see in any direction is more water (and probably sea creatures and enemies and whatnot).

I want to avoid the old cliché of solving this by setting the whole game inside underwater cave systems. I'm also against the idea of having a minimap, though some sort of map may ultimately be unavoidable.

I'm just not seeing a way to make this idea work well. Which is a shame, because I think the rest of what I have planned sounds pretty fun and unique. Of course, I probably won't even have the skill to get that far, but that's no reason to give up prematurely.

Thoughts or ideas welcome, and I can go into greater detail if need be.

[Servant Corps]

I've seen a couple of games where the purpose is exploring the environment and discovering new creatures. However, those games were 3D.

[Sensei]

Well, there's no shortage of interesting stuff you can attach to the surface and sea floor, but you already know that. If you want to have the player actually explore an environment in between there... well, you could set it along the side of a shelf (cliff face). A submarine(s) could also go there. If it's the player's submarine, that makes the middle, uninteresting area a safe point. Regardless, you'll probably end up putting the surface and seafloor unrealistically close to eachother, if you want to player to go both places, since that's where the interesting things are.

[Moogie]

Ah! I hadn't thought of shelves at all. 'Canyons' along the sea floor could be just what's needed, and it would make sense with the side-scrollery perspective. Thanks for that, Sensei.

One of the main ideas at the moment is that you would begin the game right at the bottom. Your (primary) objective is to reach the surface. Through gameplay progression, shallower depths would open up for exploration, eventually leading you to the surface. As for what exactly prevents you swimming straight up, I'm still juggling ideas there as well.... I don't want to impose nonsensical limits on what the player can do. If I want to block off those areas in the beginning, it needs to be in a way that feels natural. Maybe it's just too dangerous until you aquire X ability/item.

[Dansmithers]

I don't want to impose nonsensical limits on what the player can do.

What about the player has to wait and depressurize, but because of Bruce dangerous sea life, that's hard to do without better armour.

[Moogie]

That's one of the possibilities I had in mind, the other being a sort of soft-limit where it would simply be too dangerous until you've geared up suitably to face the higher difficulty in the areas above.

[Svampapa]

De-pressurisation is a real life limit on ascending from the deep, but does it really fit in a game? Sitting around various depths for x minutes seems dull.

I'm assuming the player didn't just materialize on the bottom in shorts and flipflops? Maybe he's a deep sea diver who had his air line get cut? Swimming with a freakin metal fishbowl on your head and lead shoes is hard.

Canyons were mentioned to switch up the scenery, various forms of algae and plantlife could add some more. Crashed planes, sunken ships... see the battlescape maps from Terror from the deep, the second X-Com game. It's probably partly rose colored glasses, but I've always thought that game managed to convey that underwater feeling really well.

[Moogie]

I'll tell you a bit about the setting, since there's really no need for me to be overly protective of it.

Sometime in the near future, a comet falls to earth, surviving the atmosphere and landing in the ocean. As it settles on the sea floor, it breaks apart... and You are inside.

You're a small, relatively simple alien lifeform. You're here because your own world was destroyed. Your immediate mission: keep the species alive. You aim to do this by assimilating into the native ecology of this new planet, and thrive. When you consume different creatures, you aquire chunks of DNA that can be mixed and matched into a sort of 'upgrade' system. This is how you evolve and progress, aquiring new abilities and powers from various species of animal.

But you're not alone here. You soon come to find that the destroyers of your world followed you here. Seeing earth's rich bounty of life (read: food), they set to work consuming anything and everything. Their influence corrupts natural wildlife and in the later game, you'll find the oceans populated mostly by them and their mutated horrors.

You can be an all-consuming predator yourself, but doing so will be tracked by the game and the world will become much more hostile as a result. If you choose instead to protect vulnerable creatures, not take more than you need, kill other alien lifeforms, and do other such niceties, the world will be much more 'supportive' of your efforts and the endgame will be much different between the two extremes.

As you start on the seabed, this is the easiest area. The surface is the hardest place, because the air above is populated by the massive harvester ships of the hostile aliens. I won't spoil how a little alien tadpole sends an entire civilisation of hungry demons packing, but you might guess it if you've ever read Animorphs.

tl,dr: Think a mixture of Ecco, E.V.O, and Spore. In other words, waaaaaaaay too ambitious for a first-timer like myself. It's not all just ideas though, I have the control system mostly coded and some simple AI so far. I'm plugging new things in, bit by bit.

[smirk]

You could always do something with energy sources. Starting off at the bottom as something fairly sedentary, not able to stray too far from the thermal vent that you rely on for food. Eventually progressing to faster movement, more energy storage, the ability to hunt other creatures for food, and/or possibly limited photosynthesis when you reach sufficient proximity to the surface. Coupled with water pressure, it should limit vertical movement enough to make things interesting.

[wierd]

The easiest and most subtle would be a color gradient for the ambient ocean water.

Near the surface, there will be a whole lot of light, and brightly colored lifeforms, but as you descend, the rayleigh scattering of the water will blur out all colors, starting with reds, eventually down to blues, and then the water will be inky black.

Near the surface, light will make beautiful rippling effects and "curtains" in the water, which can be depicted using alpha-blending effects and parallax background images. As the depth increases, the colors of fish and animal forms should fall off from the lack of natural light (unless the player sprite has light generating capabilities. In which case, I suggest you also introduce turbidity effects.)

The issue you are asking about is Y-Axis perception; how to keep the player from getting lost between surface and floor. The solution is obvious. Light falloff from surface, turbidity falloff from the bottom, and if you feel especially neat, include Thermoclines. (A thermocline is a sudden and sharp change in the density and temperature of the water, caused by a lack of deep mixing, ad lack of an ambient energy source to keep deep water hot. This sudden change in density changes the refractive index of the water, causing shimmering reflections if seen from below, and a whispy rippling viel like surface when seen from above. A similar phenomenon caused by differences in salinity is called a halocline.)

Here's a youtube video of a visible thermocline, as the diver bobs up and down through it. This looks like fresh water, such as a reservoir. That's why the water is all cloudy (turbid).  You can see from that how you could have a neat feature in the middle of the Y axis that could be made quite appealing with just some alpha blending and parallax effects, no?

Halocline produces a more crisp, and mirror diffraction like effect, but is very similar.

Here's a short clip from a BBC documentary breifly mentioning and showing a halocline.