Game Title
A Drop In The Ocean

Developer Name
Hydrophile Games

Short Promo Blurb
An underwater narrative adventure celebrating the life beneath the waves 🌊

Full Description
In 'A Drop In The Ocean', that's what you are - just a tiny raindrop falling from a thunderstorm into the sea. When you first arrive, you can barely do anything. 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.

Promo Image(s)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mKNA4pQNOiKrSt3QiapDcFgvyVMPiVGa?usp=drive_link

Promo Video
https://youtu.be/A97T5WufwoE

Artistic Statement / Use of Theme(s)
We wanted to explore lesser-explored aspects of the climate emergency, focusing on the ocean and the lifeforms that live in it. The way the ocean ecosystem is so interdependent and symbiotic was a huge inspiration to us. Even within conversations about cooperation, we are so individualism-obsessed that it always boils down to selfishness - we say “I’ll be good to the community because that’ll help me in turn”. The climate crisis demands a radical shift in thinking, and we’re asking whether maybe we can learn from the ocean. We also wanted to highlight some different stories of climate ‘justice’ - we thought it’d be really interesting to do this from the perspective of non-human actors. In this case, we focused on the attacks on boats by orcas in the Mediterranean. We imagined a world in which this is part of a coordinated movement by the ocean in response to the catastrophic overfishing and pollution in that region.

Development Summary
Two of us (Xavi: sound, and Virág: visuals) joined this game jam as a way to explore new concepts and tools. We then found Tété through the IndieCade Discord server, who joined as a programmer. The overall story and design was worked on collaboratively between the three of us. We started from a very vague concept - you play as a drop in the ocean, and there should be a strong interactive sound element. After an initial meeting, we solidified our game’s key pillars: poetic encounters with marine life, a minimalist style, the tactility of sound underwater, and a surface to sea floor progression. We decided to make a web game as we’ve all had experience making things in javascript, and it’d be a good chance to go deeper into some web frameworks. We ended up using the web engine PlayCanvas since we decided to do a 2D game.

As a small team of 3, we always had to keep scope in mind. So we had to cut quite a few ideas, or park them for any later development. We used this as a constructive limitation - for example, instead of creating a million high-res assets for a rich, teeming marine environment, we went for a minimalist, 2D style which would be more realistic in terms of time, and also less of an optimisation headache, but is also potentially a more interesting aesthetic. The biggest change from original ideas was not implementing a lot of the generative visuals and audio in favour of getting assets finished. However, we did manage do this with the music, which is being synthesised in real-time, controlled by gameplay events such as the character moving into new areas, or to underscore different stages of each story.

Release Plan
It is definitely at least functional across narrative, visuals, mechanics and audio, although it would need more polish to be released as a full game. We wrote a lot more content than what we ended up being able to fit into the game which we’d like to implement - these are additional encounters with increasingly large life forms in deeper waters, tackling bigger environmental issues. It could definitely use another pass on assets as some of them are a little rough round the edges. But code-wise it’s pretty strong, with a fairly generalised codebase so creating additional narratives will be much quicker than getting them in in the first place.