Stranded Deep

Custom fog, similar in theory to Unity's global fog, but including some nice things like the lighting from the sun and an approximation of the different extinction colours of the water with depth, distance, etc

 

Maybe this custom fog would find itself once on Asset store

 

I see pretty cool, is the underwater sunshaft are part of the fog too?

 

Really cool!
This needs Oculus Rift support!

 

I wanted to say that this game looks fascinating and the concept has allot of potential.
Your new environments are looking great. I'm excited to see where this project may lead.

 

Looks great! The only thing that looks like it is missing is some sea weed washed up on shore. By the way, do the skyboxes dynamically change with TOD? And is there going to be a dynamic weather system implemented as well?

 

Haha, maybe.

Yep.

Oculus Rift support is on our list

Nice idea Have to remember the seaweed when we add the shore foam.
Yeah, pretty much everything is dynamic in this game. The skybox uses Preetham's atmospheric scattering model with a few visual tweaks and a dynamic weather system is in it's toddler stages (up and running ).

 

Loving this project so far. Now I hate to be the one to ask this question but, do we know when it will be in a playable release? Are you guys waiting till it's perfect? Or will there be early access to just test out the environment?

 

Heres an update on the environment side of things,

Initially i had a vague vision of how i wanted the island biomes to look.. small in size, scarce in resources, and fairly basic. I figured this would produce a much more stranded vibe and emphasise on how susceptible to death you are.





This clearly wasn't going to cut it and ended up looking extremely insipid, probably due to the limitations i set myself. I was confused with how players might portray their island, Why would they ever want to be rescued from this paradise? Is their enough to explore?, enough resources for gameplay elements? It's not easy finding a nice blend.

This is the beauty with procedurally generated content though, there are no resets or scrapping design elements. I felt it lacked in vegetation, you want to feel like this is your salvation and need to be comforted by the foliage to escape from the infinite open waters. So, I played around with a few variations whilst figuring out what was lacking in atmospheric flavour, trying finding a nice balance in all the generated content.

Anyway, this is where i'm at right now, no doubt i'l end up changing a few things, figuring out what works and what we can get away with.





I know we're still lacking in some up to date footage (we're working on it) but development is speeding up alot now that i've setup the whole generation system, i've ironed out most of the issues and everything seems to be running smoothly. I'd like to go into more detail on the system but i'l probably wait until after release. It's very user friendly and the detail generation consists a lot of spawning parameters like splatmaps, heights, biomes, groupings, variety, rarity, etc, etc. It's very flexible, im thinking of re-using the system for universal use later in the future, instead of specifically for the environment we're looking for.
Anyway, everything is running super nice and i'm pretty please with how it turned out. Let me know your thoughts.

-All a work in progress, as usual.

 

Looks awesome : D
Seems the islands are a good size to me.

 

i like the new island as much as i like the old one.
well done!

lars

 

Almost missed that hut there, looks cool, also nice with some equipment teasers ; )

 

Anyone hear any news on whether or not this is coming out before the end of the year? Because I am looking really forward to this any can't wait to play it!

 

I hope you find a good balance regarding island sizes.
I myself am hoping for a lot of island survival akin to Stranded II. A bit of island to explorer, a variety in resources, and perhaps a few wild animals to keep you on your toes. Luckely, with multiple islands, resources can be more scattered, but I still hope for quite a lot of different resources and crafting/building options.
Deep down, I still feel like I might want that tropical paradise though. Maybe island sizes could be determined from game difficulty or something? Having an "easy" or "peaceful" setting just for those relaxing days, you now.

On a note on resources and crafting, can you tell us anything about how complicated the game will be? How much of the environment can we pick up and make into something useful?
And what about animals on land?

 

Looks really nice! I would love to see hunting and weapon crafting like bows and spears. I would also like to see build able things like tents and houses. Also maybe weather conditions like storms. Also is there a way to be rescued? Anyways looks great, definitly keeping my eye on it

 

I'll be keeping an eye on this, looks great

 

My 2 cents from the perspective of a person loving survival simulators, you should:
Add tidal shoals, a method of traveling that is directly dependent on the weather and the tide. forcing players to stay on one island or in their boat at night, while the tide is high, and allowing scavenging (which add another thing that could be useful, after a storm things wash up on these shoals) when the tide is low during the day. it allows you to use your dynamic weather system, assuming you are planning on implementing it, to directly influence a players activities, and it adds yet another facet of realism. i think that simplicity when dealing with survival simulators is somewhat overrated, and the more complex the situation is, the more realistic. the procedural engine ive seen mentioned would be vital for this feature.
On another note, and without asking much, do you plan on allowing basic structures for shelter? maybe the improvement or construction of boats? feel free to PM this to me, i would love to help you out, and id sign an NDA if you wanted.
Regards,
Taylor,
CEO, Tarnished Soul Studios

 

Have been working alot on above/below water wrecks and finding the best workflow procedure. Alot of titles create a small handful of prop assets and reassemble them to create completely new environments, Dishonoured for example. I figured i could incorporate a similar system to that of buildings and their interiors. I've atlased a whole bunch of static wreckage props to be used throughout many variations, low cost, efficient, and looks great. Especially when i can get away with fairly low resolution colour maps with being underwater and all.

I'm working on a procedural shipwreck assembly system for completely random interiors, hulls, rooms, etc.. more on this later. Its pushing borderline realism, im aware much wreckage environments are scrapped down to rust and coral but there're alot more important gameplay factors that have influenced otherwise. Here are a few mockup wrecks. (note some above water for lighting reasons)











Oh, and dont forget to vote for Stranded Deep in the IndieDB 2013 Of The Year

 

Woah.

 

Congrats on 3rd place on IndieDB so far!

 

I think it looks damn rusty, so it's not that bad. Some coral-props would have been cool though.

Anyway, that's for the update, it looks good. I'm glad you're going for full randomization, the more the better.

Good luck on IndieDB. Looking forward to the upcoming announcements!

 

Amazing idea.. Great screenies.. I have a couple of ideas, dont know if they allready have been mentioned:

1. Openworld, Mabye randomly generated landscape, based on different components, size of the body of warter. The makes the game a lot more replayable and increases the scary feeling of not knowing when and if it is possible to located land, before you die.
2. Mental and physical "hidden" stats. Health, Mental Health, Energy, Food, Water, Body temperature, Sun? (Too much sun damages health and energy, and increases the need to water) Increases the level of realism and need for shelter and other survival stuff.
3. Day / Night cycle (Could be like a DayZ cycle, or shorter)
4. Weather cycle that affects mental health like rain e.g. cold that affects body temperature that affects health and mental health.
5. No HUD/GUI, a bit like the game called The Forest. This increases immersiveness, and the stats could be communicated with sounds related to the different stats. Not as annoying as the DayZ standalone, where the avatar feels like a bossy bitch
6. Crafting
7. Starting setting, in later editions the player could choose or randomly generating between different settings where a different possibilities of starting gear and health stats is available. Could include plane clash (Mabye a bit like Bioshock start), sinking ship / Cargo / Passager / Cruise or military.
8. Traits choosing, that affects the stats crafting, hunting skills, electronics, survival, diving and so forth.

What do you guys think?

 

Most of the featrues have been added go to there website for a featrue list
The only to that arent there traits chose a setup or hud. He realesed a demo a long time
Ago in which you had an invetory and could see what objects where iam not sure if thats a HUD or
Not. Cheek the early alpha tralier for more info but
But thats around a year old.

 

Will tides be a factor in Stranded Deep? Don't know how you'd do it, but might add some cool possibilities for washing up stuff and other dynamics.

 

Any thoughts on releasing an alpha?

 

The game looks great, I hope it will be successful for you and I hope you post a new update soon I always enjoy reading them.

 

Amazing FULL SUPPORT!! I would recommend as someone who fully wants to buy and play already. Would it be possible to release an Alpha version as do so many new games coming

If you add island there will be a stone and wood resource giving you the ability to fish ,shelters and make fires larger island can be patched in later on in development

Would you be planning to add multiplayer for group survival ???

Also if possible a release date or near by date would be great

 

Thanks for the support everyone.

I've posted the latest update on our website and I''ll post it here too
---


A lot has been happening over the past few months and we’ve been hard at work. I’ll start with the crafting.

The crafting is working great! It’s refreshingly unique and the gameplay flows really well. I think players are really going to enjoy it. If it seems like we’re not telling you much about it, it’s because we’re not! As mentioned in my previous post, since the start of Stranded Deep’s development a few other projects have appeared with similar themes. We’re really excited about the interactivity in SD and feel it’s a really important and unique aspect to our game, and we’d like to keep it that way. I will say that it feels great as a developer to realise I’ve just spent the last 15 mins I was supposed to be ‘testing’ the game running around searching trees for coconuts and trying to catch a crab haha.

A big plus for the project’s development has been the recent integration of Marmoset’s Skyshop for Unity. It’s taken the visual quality of the game to another level! Like most Unity users, we can’t recommend Skyshop enough. The workflow is great and the results are even better. Here’s a preview of just a few of the tools you’ll find in Stranded Deep…



All in all, the interactive side of things, and the game as a whole, is well on it’s way. Now it’s just a matter of punching out more great assets until we can’t think of anymore!

Before I go, we’d just like to say how much we really appreciate everyone's patience. Ben and myself are perfectionists, and realise that our followers deserve nothing less. We realise that the project has overshot it’s original timeline. We’re sorry, but we wanted it to be better, and we knew we could make it better with more time. We’ve received a lot of criticism regards our lack of feedback. We’re sorry for that too. Unlike our AAA competitors, there’s just the 2 of us.. for everything. We have really appreciated the strong feedback from the community and realise that a lot of people want this game to be just as great as we do. When we’re slow to reply or post updates, rest assured that it’s because we’re ‘head’s down-ass up’ absolutely buried in our work ..not off at the beach (I wish! )

 

Great update, looking forward to play this
It's awesome that the game is working so well from what you are telling us.
This will hopefully be as successfull as dayz/rust, definitely has potential to do that!

 

Thanks for the update! Really awesome looking game assets. they look so professional and excellent quality.
This game continues to look more and more amazing with each new update. Looking forward to see more!

 

Hey, come across this thread today and suddenly you have one more follower. Keep up the brilliant work, men !!!

 

I purchased Skyshop the other day so I too can vouch for the boost in quality

I couldn't care less about you guys not posting very often - because every time you do you bring a whoole lot more content, it really shows you're committed and constantly working on the project.
Those assets look really gorgeous, and it'll be very interesting to see how the crafting mechanics work! Best of luck, I'm sure this game will really take off

 

I really like the look of this game and remember when the thread just came in the WIP section. It was a boat in the middle of the sea which was beautiful and scary. You've come a long way and I'm sure that this will be a success Good luck to you guys

 

I really love the concept of the game, and the screenshotss look dilicious. Definitely keeping my eye on this

 

This is really cool, good job man I was wondering, why are you making the rain on the back of the charcter as well as we won't see it ? Good job anyway ! Looking forward to seeing this completely done

 

Quick update,

After having a quick chat with Andres from Marmoset about blending cubemaps in Skyshop, I decided to fake the GI with a skylight system.
If you've been following the thread, you'll know that everything in our world is procedural, so there was actually very little in the environment cubemaps other than the sky and floor.

I've incorporated it into Skyshop so we still get the great PBR. A few more tweaks, but it should do the trick nice enough


It's a little exaggerated here, but it demonstrates the effect...

 

Another little update


There's been a lot of interest in water systems for Unity lately, so I thought I'd post a quick update on our water system for Stranded Deep.. so enough talk, video!

There has been some improvements. Our original implementation calculated the vertex displacement on the CPU for a few reasons, but that has been moved over to the GPU now.. annnd I think I've rewritten the shaders 9-10 times since last A few things are not shown in the video - the wave peaks and the sub-surface scattering.. and some underwater effects.

As always, everything's a work in progress. I'm hoping to have a chance to play with Candella's SSR in the coming weeks, so might even have another update! But there's more important things we're finishing at the moment, like building

 

Amazing stuff, and nice to see some progress : D

 

This month has been spent tying up a lot of our components loose odds and ends, making sure that they’re all integrated 100% with each other. In other words, integrating and fixing all the things I’ve been telling myself “Yep, I’ll fix that later”


One of the more visual changes is the new clouds system. Our previous system was a placeholder that I had never been happy with. It really looked like a 2D texture mapped onto a sphere… yuck. So the goal was to create a procedural, dynamically-lit cloud system that would strike a good balance between realism and performance.

The biggest challenge when dealing with something as full and fluffy as clouds is lighting the suckers. Rendering realistic, properly lit volumetric clouds in real-time is very performance-heavy. For this reason, I thought best to focus on higher altitude clouds like Alto-cumulus, Cirrus, etc. Higher altitude clouds naturally have less volume and therefore don’t require performance-heavy techniques like ray-marching to get believable results. The screenshots don’t help to sell the effect, but it looks much more natural in-game. I will be revisiting the cloud system later down the development road. I have some more ideas for lower altitude, more volumetric clouds done cheaply.

The storm system is also properly integrated now. It really adds a great sense of atmosphere. When it starts to rain it makes you want to seek cover, everything looks miserable and you soon get sick of being in the rain


There’s been plenty of progress with lots of other things too. After re-working the ocean system, underwater is now also fully integrated again. There’s more items, more easter-eggs, and Ben’s come up with a great buoyancy and propulsion system for our raft system. I’m also personally excited about one of our items that provides vital feedback to the player. It was one of those great moments where we thought of an intuitive way to express all the information you’ll need in the fastest, most concise way, while staying true to the feel of the game. More info on that one later


That’s about it for now.. Ben and I were talking the other day saying that for the first time in a long time, it actually feels like we’re getting close to early release! But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. There’s still a few systems to complete, more items, more fish… more fun

Here's some screenshots that give you a better feel for the environment of Stranded Deep ---

 

I'm glad the development is going well. How close are you to pointing out a release date? I've been following this game for a while, and this is the exact kind of game that's missing on the market currently.

 

New images looking exciting. Very different atmospheres, quite beautiful. Also looks like we can expect to encounter islands of a relatively big size, which I approve of. A great way to customize difficulty could be island sizes, as well as how often islands are found, and how many resources are available. There's some good posibilities if the system is dynamic enough.

Cool to see a stranded ship, looks like we can find those anywhere in the game then.

Also, crafted spear (I assume)!

 

A few updates ago, I mentioned that we had incorporated Marmoset Skyshop into our rendering pipeline. Well we have now moved away from Skyshop and to our own lighting model.

I have to say that Skyshop is a great product, but it’s better suited for static environments. Because everything in our world is so dynamic, a lot of the great features of Skyshop were redundant in our game. So after having to customise and re-write most of Skyshop to suit our needs, the decision to just write our own lighting model wasn’t difficult.

The screenshot below is a good visual representation of the differences between two of the lighting models now used in Stranded Deep. The surfaces’ roughness increases from a value of 0 to 1, from left to right.



The bottom spheres use an improved version of a traditional lighting model that is used in a lot of games called Blinn-Phong, great for things like hard plastics and rubber. The top spheres use a custom lighting model that is better suited to things like metals and rough surfaces like rock, sand, skin and cloth. I’ll be going into more details about the rendering techniques used in Stranded Deep after release, but for now at least that gives some context to what I’ve been working on lately and why.




What else?

Ben’s been working on character animations, which has helped add another level of immersion. Building and crafting has been fully functional for a while now and is working great We’re finalising everything that you can craft and build. All the physics for the raft building and propulsion has been completed as well. It is really unnerving motoring around an island on your raft at night, or going out into deep water!

There’s been a lot of work finalising all our creatures. A while ago we purchased an ocean pack full of fish. It would have been a great way to get a lot of variety quickly.. However, there was a lot of work getting them game-ready. Ben has had to re-topologize every one as they had a silly amount of triangles, and then create the various levels of detail for each fish. Thankfully animating them wasn’t as painful. Using Unity’s Mecanim animation retargeting, a base fish model could be rigged and animated and then applied to all the smaller fish. Larger animals like sharks, rays and turtles have their own individual animations.





Ben’s also been hard at work creating the intro sequence for the game ..and it’s looking and playing fantastic! We had discussed the possibility of not needing it for early access, but after experiencing the intro scene, the game isn’t the same without it! It’s intense and creates a lot of impact. We’re not revealing much about it as we think it will be more enjoyable as a fresh experience.

There’s lots of other little things as well, those boring but important things ..things like confirming menu designs and making sure saving works. We’ve decided on an end-game scenario that players will have to work out We also noticed that we have a lot of german, russian and french followers so we’re looking into translation As a whole, the game is really starting to come together and feels great. It’s getting closer guys!

 

Great news! Screens looks amazing as always : D
When will we get to see some moving pictures? : p

 

Hey Dev's how close are you now? I'm one of those few people who have been waiting for this since last year lol, I'm going crazy waiting for this!!!

 

Environments and lighting is just honestly one of best i have ever seen. Even though your scenes are not at all poluted with hundreds of assets they look really well. This game will defenetly be flagship tittle for Unity, if gameplay will be as good as screens look at moment, this will top the Forest. I am also glad to see that you have been using underwater animals pack, even though you were not pleased with animations and topology its nice to see those things see in solid project. I know you arent planning it most likely but turning this into multiplayer would be real fun, though i defenetly look towards singleplayer.

As for Skyshop those are bit sad news to me, as i was afraid that dynamic weather systems do not fit to it trough sky changes. Now that means that most likely new Unity 5 environemnt lighting will not work with it aswell since it uses pretty much same approach, which is double sad news. I guess thats the tradeoff of dynamic weather systems.

Maybe a question, are you planning using GI ? To be honest looking at screens there is no need for it at all as it all looks already good enough from lighting perspective, but for night time it should lit scene better.

 

Hey Guys, we've sort of abandoned posting here for quite some time.
For those interested, we've been posting our updates onto our site: http://beamteamgames.com/

Thanks for the interest

 

just had a look at your updates about the terrain: it looks very nice!
is there anything you could share with the community or on the official "after 4 years we might rework the terrain engine" thread?

lars

 

Wow! Looks great, can't wait to play as a virtual Crusoe. My primal fear of sharks will be challenged... but this time I won't have a nanosuit to protect me haha.

Keep up the great work.

 

Hey guys!
After two years, we’re finally ready to show-off our first teaser trailer for Stranded Deep.
We are incredibly humbled by the response of our growing Stranded Deep survivors, so we hope you enjoy watching it us much as we did making it.

 

Looking Good Ben.....