Jonas - Introduction

Hey, I'm Jonas Luebbers, an aspiring artist/programmer and freshman at Williams College. I am interested in many areas of graphics programming, including generative art, game design, and graphical interface design. I have had some experience programming games for fun in my free time, but I have never been able to bring a project to completion.

I will be competing in the 48 hour competition, primarily because I work better during long uninterrupted periods. My goal is to become more familiar with the structure of 3D games to facilitate my future game-making efforts.

The Game: You play as a scuba diver lost in a maze of underwater caves. Armed with only a flashlight, a single harpoon, and your wits, you must defend yourself from the sea creature that lurks within...

The major gameplay element is that you can only hold one of your two items at once. The light makes it easier to see, but it will also scare away the monster (which I plan to be some sort of giant eel) Allowing it to return when the light is turned off. The harpoon will kill the monster in one shot, but it is hard to aim in the dark.

I plan on making this game with the Unity3D engine, as it makes first person 3D graphics incredibly easy. I also have no C or C++ experience, so this is an easy choice for me. On the technical end of things, the hardest parts will be procedurally generating the caves, and animating the monster. To generate the caves, I am planning on generating a 3D scalar field of noise, which I will then refine using cellular automata, before creating a mesh with the marching cubes algorithm. From there, it should be easy to import the mesh into Unity. For the monster, I might whip something up using a few cylinders that follow each other offset by a sine function.

Right now I am working hard at understanding some of the more complicated functionality of procedural generation in Unity. Hopefully I havent over-extended myself once again...