A Drop In The Ocean - Prototype

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'

Early prototype for our submission to Climate Jam 2024 💧 Read more about the project at our Ideation page.

Playable Prototype

We are making our game using PlayCanvas rather than a traditional game engine, so most of our work this week has been about getting systems up and running and fleshing out the structure for the game - so there's not a huge amount to show. So what it is is more of a proof of concept from the very start of the game - falling as a raindrop into the sea, encountering phytoplankton (tiny plants), being taught to move, helping the plankton and, in doing so, learning a new understanding to take with you on your journey.

Beautiful Corner

Art

The game is using almost all placeholder assets. Although we don't have all of the assets and animations in game yet, our artist Virág mocked up a short style test to give us a sense of how it might look!

And here are some shots of environmental layers:

Audio

The music in the prototype is made from improvisations with a synth designed by our sound artist Xavi in Max/MSP. The idea is to integrate this directly into PlayCanvas to have the music generated in real-time so that it can respond dynamically to the player's progression, and merge with the sound-making special abilities. Check out this screen recording of Xavi playing with the different parameters that we will expose to control the music: 

This link should let you play it yourself - https://xaviervelastin.com/interactive/audio/dropper_synth/dropper.html - it was just done to test the web export would work. Press 'start audio' to begin the audio engine', then 'turn on' to start the music. The different buttons switch between three parameter presets.