Sea of Fog - Developer's commentary

"Sea of Fog" is a standalone art piece I've been working on in between other projects.

In the year 2222, the atmosphere has changed drastically, with most of the planet's water caught in a state between liquid and gas. This thick fog covers all but the highest peaks, and due to its constantly shifting chemical makeup, doesn't conform to the established laws of physics. All traces of ancient civilization have long been lost, leaving it up to you to piece together the missing chapters of history.



The gameplay is simple and exploratory: players take on the role of a historian witch, who drops down from their airship home using a broom-shaped antigravity device. They wander a series of randomly-generated islands and explore the remains of 21st century civilization. The bottom layers of this new landscape are taken up by a corrosive water-like liquid, which will instantly kill the player.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of future archaeology: what would researchers of the future think of an item like a corkscrew when all of the corks have eroded? This concept has unfortunately fallen by the wayside in  most post-apocalyptic fiction, which is more focused on combat and survival than cultural anthropology. Which is why I wanted to build something post-post-apocalyptic - all traces of ancient civilization have long since faded away, and been built over by later empires which have also long since passed into prehistory. It's vague and mysterious, and allows the player's imagination to do a lot of the storytelling, the occasional story clues designed to raise as many questions as they answer.

Worldbuilding details are provided with a press of the examine key, which displays a string of text related to the nearby surroundings. Many games include this kind of microfiction in books or computer terminals - a clever convention, but one which essentially pauses the game and takes the player out of the experience. I've played a bit with bite-sized chunks of flavor text in past projects, usually in the form of billboards and news bulletins - but this sort of narrative approach is one which I think works a little better.

I think the procedural world generation in this piece is particularly well-done - it squeezes a lot of variety out of a handful of assets while maintaining quick load times. This is a different approach to the concept than what I've seen in other games other games, which tend to generate their terrain data with complex algorithms. It's a nice showcase of programming ability, but can lead to long loading times and landscapes which don't look very realistic.



Sea of Fog's alternate approach is to place a combination of pre-crafted terrains with randomized dimensions. Stretching the dimensions out like this takes very little processing power, and allows elements like roads and ditches (which tend to look unnatural when generated by code) to retain a hand-drawn shape even as they're twisted into countless variations. The weather effects that provide the world's atmosphere are also highly randomized - tweaking the ambient light, fog, and cloud colors to ensure every new world explored comes with its own unique color scheme.

One other element I'd like to note is the death effect. When the player dies, the last thing on their camera is gradually twisted into a wide-angle, hyper-saturated piece of abstract art. This provides even more variety than the standard weather, and I've been surprised at just how good looking most of these abstract final moments have turned out. This kind of extreme color-tweaking is something I'd absolutely like to play more with in future projects.

As an art piece, I'm extremely happy with this, and imagine it would look amazing projected on the wall of a tech-focused art gallery. With the addition of some custom models of ruins and non-player characters, and a few more gameplay elements, it could also be a great fit for the indie sections of the Steam and Epic game stores. At any rate, the systems on display here are also ready to be attached to just about any project - between the procedural techniques and the painterly approach to color, I think there's a lot of beauty in this piece which could just as easily be applied in other contexts.