A Drop In The Ocean

🌧 About

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.  Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? 
- David Mitchell, 'Cloud Atlas'

In 'A Drop In The Ocean', that's just what you are - a tiny raindrop falling from a thunderstorm into the sea. When you first arrive, you don't know where you are, and you can barely even move around. But as you explore your surroundings, you encounter a myriad of marine life, from the tiny phytoplankton trying to get some sunlight at the surface to enormous kelp forests reaching up from deeper waters. These lifeforms tell you stories, inspired by a mixture of scientific research and folk tales, that lead you to discover more about the ocean, the struggles it faces, and how it defends itself from human intrusion. And as you learn, you gain special abilities that help you progress in your journey.

This is a short interactive narrative game created for Climate Jam 2024. You can play it in your browser, you only need a mouse. Most of the gameplay is exploring your bit of ocean and the lifeforms that live in it - there’s no fail state or high score, just go through it at your own pace.

🌊 Controls

This is a mouse-only game. Move by clicking in the direction you want to move in. When you gain special abilities, you can cycle through them with the mouse wheel, and trigger them with right click.

💧 Credits

Tété: Programming, Design
Virág: Art, Animation
Xavi: Audio, Narrative, Production

If you're interested in seeing the process of how this came about, you can visit our submissions for the previous sprints here - Ideation | Prototype | Production.

🐋 Paul Watson

Anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson was arrested in Greenland on the 21st July 2024 for actions against Japanese whaling fleets and now faces deportation to Japan. Japan left the international moratorium against hunting whales in 2019 and now does so commercially, threatening whale populations once again. The moratorium, signed in 1982, has been one of the great success stories of environmental action - grassroots activism against corporate power finally managed to convince the world to come together in a common goal. This is a developing story; please take a minute to look up Paul Watson, his activism, and the case against him.