Deeper Blue

The concept of "Deep Blue" began as an underwater submarine game in fact the folder on my drive still bears the original name "Sub Attack". Blue waters with light rays dancing through the scenes. But after seeing a few videos on YouTube about the deep sea creatures I though it would be more interesting for it to take place much deeper in the ocean. And that's when things really started to develop from a creature/vehicle concept.

The only problem, and one that's been really getting to me recently, is the fact that 30,000 feet underwater looks much different than 500 feet underwater. Visibility becomes a major game play element. Even with some of the story elements of Deep Blue that would add a little more light to the scene, the environment would be much different at that depth.

I've decided to shoot for something inbetween reality and game...which seems to be a common approach so far...and go for a much darker environment the deeper you go.

To pull this off, I hope, I'll use a pixel shader to darken the value of the entire screen then use glow textures with an additive value to 'light up' the lights on the MANTA or the bioluminecent creatures of the deep. At least that's the theory.

So far the darkening part seems to be working pretty well, now I've just got add glowing light sources back in. The shader started out as a game component, much like the bloom shader I'm using. But I needed more control over the draw order so the UI and messaging wouldn't be effected by the darkening so I switched it to a class.