Whalesong

Concept

• A minimal "walking simulator" (or "swimming simulator" I guess?)
• Control a whale making its way down South from Australia to the Antarctic for summer.
• (Animal migration is a cycle, get it?)
• The game is peaceful and all about the atmosphere and discovering things along the way.
• Encounters include birds, schools of fish, boats, other whales.
• There is no end, and you can't die.
  • or maybe there is an end after a while when you reach Antarctica.
• There are weather patterns and a day / night cycle.
• There are storms
• There are icebergs
• The art is hand-sketched line art
• top down perspective
• The whale performs different actions when it encounters different things, for instance:
  • it plays around ships,
  • it eats fish,
  • it sings to other whales,
  • sometimes other whales will join ours
• The player has limited controls, but can move left and right to move towards or avoid things.
• The whale never stops swimming, just moves relentlessly South,
  • practically the whale stays still and the waves etc move around it.
• The player can possibly (easter egg redacted)

Tasks

• remove template art work and sound effects
• spawn the whale
• show the controls (minimal tutorial)
• spawn starting waves
• periodically spawn other waves
• waves move
• background music
• encounter spawning system
• whale movement
  • turn the whale when arrow keys are pressed
  • move the waves diagonally when arrow keys pressed
• add encounters
  • birds
    • bird graphics added to creature.png
    • bird spawner
    • birds randomly spawn every X seconds
    • if birds get close, they circle the whale
    • after a while, the birds leave
    • add a "wander in area" behaviour while following the whale
    • bird sound effects
  • schools of fish
    • create fish sprite
    • spawn fish
    • fish boids
    • fish encounters
    • fish avoid the whale
  • ships
    • ship sprites
    • ship wake
    • engine noise
    • ship occludes waves, fish, whale but not birds
  • other whales
    • whalesong
• Weather cycles
  • day/night
  • rain
  • snow
  • icebergs
• polish
  • restyle the menu
  • make rotate + wave movement lerp smoothly transition between left/off/right instead of jumping immediately
  • when the whale turns there is a lot of empty space at the screen edges - no waves
  • move whale not things around the whale
  • update the credits
  • refactor whale movement to make it a bit less janky when turning
  • refactor whale following movement
  • fix baby not displaying
  • fix baby whale movement
  • fix flipped movement
  • refactor spawning rates to correspond with distance a bit better
  • snow first when travelling north
  • fix flip text
  • ship horn only sounds once
• code "quality" lol
  • store whale position in a resource
• stretch goals
  • periodically come up to breathe
  • don't allow whale rotation until the whale has fully completed its entrance animation and is positioned on the screen
  • Display player help icons after movement complete.
  • add the movement easter egg (its a secret)
  • add the cycles easter egg (its also a secret)
    • flip camera
    • flip anything that needs flipping
    • flip the controls
    • flip on a timer
    • flip text
    • add phase 1 on the northern flip
      • make it 100% likely on flip 1
      • make it not 100% on future flips
    • add phase 2 on the southern flip (if the northern one occurs)
• bugs
  • starting wave animations all start at the same frame so they're all in sync
  • crash in movement when window minimised or in the background due to windows.single()
  • move targets aren't updated on screen resize, meaning that things just pile up on the screen edges
• jam admin
  • update Cargo.toml
  • fix CI yaml file
  • set up itch page
  • do a test release
  • work out why the itch build isn't working
  • do a "Final final v1 latest" release before the jam ends
  • deploy to itch
  • add screenshots and details to the jam page
  • test deployed version

These ideas were abandoned due to it being a game jam game:

• weather
  • wind
  • storms
• stretch goals
  • add more encounters
  • add islands
  • add more music variety
  • ships avoid icebergs :grimace:
  • whale turning animation
• ship volume depends on proximity to the whale
• icebergs have different sizes without blurring

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QaFM5X7KZX4

Credits

• I've included https://github.com/DanielDK05/bevoids/ in this repo with the following changes:
  • update for bevy 0.14.0
  • allow setting velocity directly
  • add a BoidJitter component which adds a bit of random jitter to the movement
  • add a BoidRepulsor component which isn't a boid but pushes boids away
• Sounds with "complex" names were taken from freesounds.org, and were all CC0 licensed.

Template

This repo used a slightly modified version of the bevy quickstart template.

License

The source code in this repository is licensed under any of the following at your option:

• MIT License
• Apache License, Version 2.0

Assets are licensed under

• CC0-1.0 License