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Rocking the boat (and other cheap tricks)

Hi all, Liam here again!

When we started working on Sunless Sea, we knew that we wanted it to focus on good gameplay and storytelling above all else. That said, we also want it to have a distinctive visual style and to look as good as it plays. Fallen London is a game of words, but it also has great artwork in it, and making sure Sunless Sea lives up to that is important to us.

Moving from static art to pictures that exist in a living world is hard though, and it can require a lot of time to get it looking right. We're a small team and we don't want our primary focus to be complex animations and visual trickery, that's why we opted to make a 2D game in the first place. So, in order to enhance the look our game and make it feel like a living, breathing world, we're using a lot of little tricks.

One of the tricks we're using is parallax movement. Games have used this technique for a long time to indicate the relative distance between objects. I remember playing Shadow of the Beast for the first time and being blown away by the sense of depth the game created using this effect. Obviously, there isn't as much use for parallax movement in a top-down game (and we're very wary of over-using it with poor results), but it works well for giving a sense of the weight of your boat if you 'cheat' a little bit of rocking into its movement.

I've created a short video to demonstrate the technique (heads up, you won't need sound for this video):



We experimented with this effect and we were really happy with how much heft is added to your boat, especially when turning. It stopped feeling like a rotating plane (which, of course, it is) and felt like you were forcing a heavy object to move around. It isn't the only cheap trick at work on the boat however, we've got some particle emitters in there are well.

I LOVE particle emitters. Essentially, they are little objects that 'emit' a sprite and pass in a bunch of information on how they should behave. When they should grow larger, when they should fade out, how they should be affected by gravity, their velocity and direction etc. The great thing about them is, you set them up once and they can keep on emitting for a long time. They're perfect for smoke, or fog, or the wake of a boat. As you can see in the video, we've got a wake that gradually grows and fades as it gets further away from the boat. Working in North Greenwich can be very useful when it comes to creating particle emitters for boats, because I can just look out of the window and compare the wakes with the ships cruising down the Thames.

Again, particles are a great way of making something static feel like it has life and movement. A picture of a house has smoke coming from the chimney and flies buzzing around the compost heap at the bottom of the garden, and suddenly it stops feeling like a picture and becomes a (stylised, to be sure) real house.

A little of this stuff goes a long way, and if you know how to use it, it can create great effects without taking up all our time. Which is great for us, cos that means we can focus on the elements of this game that are going to make it really unique.

**UPDATE**

We've been looking at this animation again, and I think that Jellydonut and others are quite right and it is leaning in the opposite direction for the size of ship that we are have in the game. We've flipped the animation and it does look better. In regards to the amount, this is slightly exaggerated and perhaps not a perfect simulation of the movement of a ship, but we are aiming for a slightly heightened look anyway and it adds a sense of weight to the feeling of turning.

The pivot is not directly at the back, but is very nearly at the back. I don't think it's easy to get a sense of how it is steering without actually being in control of the boat. JamsCB's comment about the movement of the ship is correct though, this isn't a physics simulation and our main focus is to make something that is functional and simple that feels like steering a boat. The feedback you have given has helped us refine that now and we are very grateful, and we'll be continuing to tweak this as over time.

Thanks for all your comments people!