Devlog #3 - Design Document

Hey everyone! We’ve made some exciting progress this week, and the project is really starting to take shape. From improving the octopus’s movement to refining underwater visuals and adding immersive sound effects using FMOD — things are feeling a lot more alive (and a lot more splashy 🐙🌊). Check out what we’ve been working on below!

Game Design Updates

• Updated movement logic to prevent the octopus from flying freely. The octopus now relies on proper climbing and grabbing mechanics to reach elevated areas, introducing more realistic movement constraints.

Visual & Level Design Updates

Environment Updates

• Adjusted pipe layout and interactions based on new movement constraints. Realized that the octopus could no longer access the pipe area easily, so added a large anchorable stone object below the pipe to serve as a climbable aid.
• Continued iterating on rock and coral placements to ensure accessibility while preserving natural underwater flow.
• Added a bright yellow treasure chest to the environment as an interactive object. Players can grab and lift the lid, revealing space inside. You can also grab nearby rocks and place them into the chest, because why not stash some ocean treasures?

Water Effect Updates

• Finalized our underwater rendering effect using Shader Graph and a renderer feature setup. The water surface now supports dynamic refraction and stylized distortion using custom normal maps. A caustic effect is added as well.
• Integrated a separate plane for water surface visuals, enhancing clarity and making the underwater space more distinct.
• Fine-tuned underwater post-processing fog and lighting, achieving a more immersive feel both in Scene and Game views.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Paro on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@paro456) for the tutorials that served as the foundation for these improvements. Your work is greatly appreciated!

Player-Control Indicators

• Added color-coded UI indicators for each player to show which tentacle they’re controlling clearly. This makes it much easier to coordinate during gameplay and adds a splash of personality to each limb!

Programming Updates

Implemented Spherical Tentacle-Hand Limit

• We refactored the Tentacle-Hand movement script to detect if a player-controlled hand is at a max radius/distance away from the base of the tentacle/shoulder of the tentacle (i.e. the first bone in the tentacle chain). Within this radius, the player will be able to control xyz movement like before, but now if the tentacle and hand are fully extended, we prevent movement beyond a spherical limit (determined as tentacle length away from the tentacle shoulder) AND adapt any movement inputs at this limit to rotate at the tentacle base/shoulder axis. In other words, we implemented radial tentacle movement with the base as the axis.

Audio Updates

FMOD Audio Integration

We have fully integrated FMOD into the project for scalable and modular audio control. FMOD now handles all background music and sound effects with better performance monitoring and runtime flexibility.

Created and configured FMOD events for:

• Background Track – plays on game start, set to loop.
• Grabbable Interaction – one-shot sound triggered when grabbing or releasing grabbable objects. Anchorable Movement – one-shot sound triggered when grabbing anchorable objects to initiate movement.

There have been some minor updates on our Audio Assets spreadsheet table to reflect new possible audio variations regarding our character, as well as to clarify details related to our background music duration time, and potential new background music variations as well.

Additionally, we’ve created a dedicated “Audio & Music” folder to keep up with our sound assets organized and ready for future potential use in our game.   

Next Steps

Playable Level

Now that the core movement mechanic for the octopus is up and running—with each player controlling an individual tentacle and collaboratively pulling the body around—it’s time to shift our focus to building the first playable level. This next step will involve designing an environment that challenges players to coordinate, grab, and navigate using their chaotic but satisfying shared control. The goal is to start testing how our mechanics hold up in a real gameplay setting and begin shaping the overall game experience.

Octopus Model

Additionally, our focus is on bringing the octopus to life visually. The design team has been hard at work modeling the octopus character (tickles), and the next step is to rig these assets and integrate them into the game. This will replace our placeholder visuals and give the octopus a unique personality and charm that matches the chaotic, cooperative gameplay. Rigging the model to match our physics-based tentacle system will be key to maintaining the feel of the controls while making the game world more immersive and expressive.