Games Born of The Wild: The Depths

Born of The Wild: The Depths is a multiplayer survival horror animal game.

You will play as some of the worlds most fascinating aquatic animals, ranging from the Great White Shark all the way to the Dunkleosteus in this online Survival PVP game.

Over time I'll post some progress of the game here, however if you want to stay the most up-to-date please join the games discord at: https://discord.gg/6WRRT7R

Below is some basic information on it:

Render Pipeline: HDRP.
Scripting: For now monobehaviours until/unless performance degradation.
GameModes: Currently only Multiplayer is planned. Single player is possible, just not my goal currently, I see no reason not to do a single player one day, just not currently planned this very moment.

What's the goal of the game?
In BOTW: The Depths - you spawn in as a small child of the animal you chose (or you can get hatched in as a baby) if you want to spawn in with a team immediately. The goal of the game is to survive and grow for as long as you can in a ruthless world where everything and everyone wants to eat you, the more you age the stats you select for your animal will begin to kick in.

This isn't a real-life simulation, in fact it's the total opposite of real life. For example, I'd love to implement genetic engineering mechanics into the game so you can for example - give your great white shark camouflage like an octopus, however - doing so will negatively affect your shark in some other manner, perhaps this will be speed, strength, this is to be determined.


Take care everyone!
NOTE: If you want to stay the most up-to-date please join the games discord at: https://discord.gg/6WRRT7R

Official Twitter page if you want to be informed of new things without joining the Discord: https://twitter.com/OfficialDepths

Official Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/officialdepths/

 

Here's the revitalized Great White Shark. I had to completely re-do it. I didn't like the way the last one turned out. So for the past couple of days I've been re-working it. It's a lot more satisfactory now.

I think I should make some better teeth though lol.

 

This is one of the early Ocean tests with HDRP.

 

@N1warhead Love what your doing, great idea/storyline, But whats more challenging is using HDRP (pros/cons), i may use it in my next project, as by then it will be fully done and released.

What caught my eye 1st was the water. You have the hue of the water perfect, so many people make the water hue too light. Also shader faux physics, nice touch bro

 

@warthos3399 thank you

Yeah HDRP is a bit different, despite the cons with it, the pros outweigh it. The scalability of it is so superior that i'll (never) use the standard renderer again, ever - no matter what. - Well unless it's for a platform that doesn't support HDRP at least lol.

Yeah the underwater effect (using only standard HDRP Fog), I'll be playing around with it, I want to simulate more realistic tones of underwater. What's cool is the volume fog with HDRP works with the directional light, so it gets darker the deeper you go, and it also changes colors based on the angle of the light.

But the biggest con with HDRP is sadly that terrain grass isn't supported, i'll have to improvise on that matter. But that's a good thing with underwater - I can cut rendering off at a short distance so I can throw in a lot of details.

But on this note, I haven't shared this image anywhere else (yet), figured may as well share it on here.
An image of the adult Great White Shark biting in Animation preview in Unity.

I do plan on having multiple types of attacks, at least 2. A primary weaker attack, and a secondary that is stronger but affects your character somehow, such as a special attack with the great white will be a lot more damaging however it might burn a bit of your stamina. (just an example).

 

Really nice! The ocean test shot is gorgeous. Is the water a 3rd party asset?

 

Thank you .. I made the water shader in Shader Graph. The underwater parts however is some HDRP Fog trickery.

 

Ah neat, how is the water line done? Some underwater approaches just use a post processing volume, but that approach doesn't allow for the screen to be split like that into underwater and above water. What are you doing?

 

I just have the fog meet with the water height and it just worked with some tweaking. This isn't a one size fits all solution though. I'm sure if I made it storm and had massive waves things would look awkward. But for my current use-case it works good to have slight waves.

 

Looks nice, but what about actual gameplay, mechanics, movement, animations.
Do you have anything done in that area?
Any showcase?

 

Thanks

Yeah I got movement and animations for the shark currently. I'm designing the control systems to be interchangeable between all animals so once I get the controls nailed out things will be smooth sailing for new characters.

But the game is very early in development so there's not currently any actual (in-game) stuff other than movement and animations for the shark and a bit of seaweed I made, ohhh I made a shader that you can move Seaweed to the side when your animal gets near it), but it's a bit bugged but does work.

Also I did make day/night cycle, one that server owners can control so they can change them to 1 second or 24+ hours per day if they want. (actual time).

Once I am happy with my shark animations I'll start focusing on the actual game-mechanics such as fighting, eating, stam regen, and if a mammal (getting air), AI Fish(perhaps schools of fish), growing systems, old age systems, genetics systems, team grouping, etc.

Most of the mechanics in the game will revolve around the combat systems so I need to get the shark good first.

 

The first dev log is up!

http://warhead-designz.com/news/botw-the-depths-dev-log-1

 

Nice one.
Lol, the vid is funny to watch, like playing with rubber ... (not saying what)

 

hahahahaha that's funny... Yeah it's the first time messing around with character joints.

 

very cool blog

 

Thank you

 

is attack procedural or self animated? if so what r pros and cons?

 

are you a water star sign btw lol?

 

@unit_dev123 : The attacking animation is a keyframed animation I made in 3Ds Max. The body I'm attacking activates character joints (component on the bone) so it gives a ragdoll physics.

Not sure what you mean by "are you a water star sign".

 

This is pretty interesting result.... Accurate scales... Despite the baby (smaller one) being 1.5 meters (5 feet) long it appears soooo small compared to the mommy shark... (I haven't done any body adjustments yet), just simply scaled it down to the correct size.)



Fun fact: Great Whites from the moment of birth - run away from their moms and most never survive more than a year. Because their moms will eat them as well.

 

Look mommmy I grewwwwss up today (Using Blendshapes to morph the body a bit and scaling up).

 

Great White is hungry, fixing to feast on some Dories! lol

 

Jaws - Theme song

 

Now that's pretty funny hahaha

 

Two images of the great white attacking a baby great white at night.

 

Until I get a dev log up I figured I'd share a funny little video with y'all of a big oops with server-side growth to the client hahaha..

But then I go over some of the morphing systems (Blendshapes).

 

I need to say, from art point of view, considering is a game, these look cool to me

 

Thank you
Yeah HDRP is so amazing.

I still have a lot to learn with HDRP, but man is it great.

 

I know this is OT but you have great radio voice

 

OT? LOL.

But thanks, I think? hahahaha.

 

There's now an official Instagram for Born of The Wild: The Depths!
https://www.instagram.com/officialdepths/

 

We will be having a dev-log soon everyone! After this current system I'm making is done I'll be making a dev log for you all! As always - Patron's will get the DevLog 1 day early as well.

 

The new dev log is out!
This time in video format

 

The new Mini Dev Log for the week is now on our patreon, going over the extension systems to the Growth System dealing with Sexual Dimorphism. You can view it here https://patreon.com/OfficialDepths if you are a patron, if not, the Mini Dev Log will be available tomorrow for the public.

Thanks everyone.

 

The first mini dev-log is now out for Born of The Wild: The Depths! This log goes over the Sexual Dimorphism mechanics built into the growth system now.

http://warhead-designz.com/news/born-of-the-wild-the-depths-mini-dev-log-1

 

Here's some info on the sexual dimorphism system in how it handles the differences between male and females. (ALL OF THIS IS IMPLEMENTED RIGHT NOW).

There is more stuff that it changes, but this is what I could fit on an image in a way that makes sense.

 

Well due to IndieDB's policy's I will no longer continue doing Mini-Dev logs from this point forward. Apparently they want 'tons' of information rather than going over one system.

I get it, just didn't expect that to happen.
So I'll go back to trying to get 1 dev log a month and I'll start dev streaming again here soon.

 

Any reason you tied you self to them?

I thought dev log is simply your own commitment. Not like requirement by third party.
Sometimes you may don't want to share certain details. Or simply not having a time.

I suggest to use SI units. Or switch to see both. Most understand SI, not every body understands imperials units.

 

@Antypodish : I just want to make sure everyone gets them all at the same time, micromanaging when and where things go is just a lot of extra work. But it mainly boils down too - making sure everyone gets the same information on all the avenues I take.. It wouldn't be fair to my IndieDB followers to get the occasional update when somewhere else gets updates every week or whatever else. But the reason IndieDB is prioritised aside from 'fairness' is because it's an avenue that big media giants look through. So it's not so much a consumer market area, but an area that media companies look for some cool games to write up articles about.

Honestly it didn't even cross my mind to changing Units up, it's just easier for me to understand imperial, I only deal with the metric system because I have too, not really a fan of it honestly. I suppose it's because I was brought up on the imperial (inch, foot, yard, acre, mile, ounce, pound), etc lol.

But I suppose you do make a point - being the game is already in metric may as well make all marketing material and UI systems in metric too lol.

 

I've got some really exciting stuff I'd like to go over in a new article I just wrote up. This isn't so much a dev-log as it is just purely information on what's been accomplished and what's to come. It goes over everything I've made, for the most part, and what the near future plans are, testing phases and perhaps an EA release on the horizon! You can read the article here. http://warhead-designz.com/news/born-of-the-wild-the-depths-onward-plans

 

Comparison (a new ground texture vs an old one).

 

Just a couple photos of some new objects.
1 - New seaweed plant.
2 - New Coral Branches (Just different color variations [Blue, Purple, Red and Yellow]

 

You can now wishlist the game on steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/1296220/Born_of_The_Wild_The_Depths/

 

The seal is now in the game, awwww look at these adorable bundles of joy

 

Mommy is on baby duty!

 

really love the fur shader, any tips on how you made it?

 

@unit_dev123 Oh wow Unity didn't alert to that you commented hmmm.
But yeah, I went into shader graph and made a Hair graph. From there I just used the standard LIT workflow - masking, etc. Might be a few other slight adjustments in the shader, but that's the gist of that.

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Tomorrow there will be 6ish minute dev vlog available to the public (patreon currently available).
But until then here's an image (unrelated to the dev log).

 

The latest exciting Dev VLog is out, it's really exciting with the new ocean atmospherics!

 

is looking really cool now, i love the caustics!

 

Thank you. Yeah they are looking great I think too