Building UI for Diving in my Marine Biologist RPG 

I like the idea of fading out when you run out of air, and maybe washing up on the nearest beach. Losing items and some exp seem like a good alt to just "dying".

If the player runs out of air he could pass out and lose all the items he just collected. He could also appear back on the beach with some npc telling him that they found him floating or that the waves pushed him back to the shore

I really like the idea that you wouldn't be able to have more than one face visible on the dive watch. so you would have to pick between having a map, knowing your depth, or knowing your current oxygen.

For running out of air, I think fading the screen out to black initially would be great. Then the regular screen would fade back in and show the player washed up on the beach (maybe just with a singular frame drawn of the player lying down) with a pop up showing the items that you've lost. When you click continue on the pop up, you stand up and get a very short debuff of some kind. Maybe slower movement or making it so the player can't dive until the next day. Just throwing out some ideas :D

As an alternative to just dying or washing up to the nearest beach, I like the idea that the player is being saved by a dolphin which appears when the player is in danger. While the dolphin brings the player to the shore, the dolphin may steal an item or two from the player. I would love to see that. It fits the cute and funny style of the game and also may connect the player more to the ocean and the sea life and gives a more of a reason to safe the ocean. Anyways, Amazing game!

I think you could have make your life way easier with the depth-indicator. Instead of calculating position and rotation all the time - you just could have placed a parent object with a centered pivot point. Then just rotate the parent-object and your indicator will match perfectly

The game is looking awesome! The diving mechanic reminds me of a flash game I used to play called "Scuba". Also I'd like to point out that when diving in real-life the air consumption is not constant, but you lose air more quickly the deeper you go. At 10m it's 2x the normal rate, at 20m it's 3x, at 30 it's 4x, etc. Would be a cool feature to implement and make diving deeper more thrilling!

Love the dive watch, although it feels to me like the oxygen meter would make more sense with full on the right and empty on the left.

I vote for fade-out and wake up on the beach when running out of air. That way if you have deep caves or complicated areas, you don’t need to show the player going all the way back up

When the player runs out of air, have dolphins carry him to shore and note that items were lost during the "trip".

1:20: The diver's-watch aesthetic is pretty great. I like how much of Dauphin's UI and such is meant to represent things an actual marine biologist might use. 11:55: That sounds like a pretty good system. The consequences should scale with current depth, though-instead of a constant, say, 25% of items being lost, you might lose half your inventory if you're a dozen meters down but almost nothing if you ran out of air one meter from the surface.

I love the design of the diver's watch! That little coffee spillage in your B-Roll was quite funny. "napkin math" is probably my new favourite phrase

The game look in a good shape! But i would like to report an issue with the air refilling. In this moment it works as you don't have equipment. But once you have diving equipment you should not be able to refill them just placing your face over the surfcae. It could be a good idea to add in that watch the equipment icons (full or empty) and the timer restarting for each equipment. So for example if you have the oxygen tank equipped, timing will depend for the current activated. If you are using only your lungs you have the timer for that (which can increase as ability of the player) but if you stick the head over the surface you can only refill your lungs and not the quipment

Nice job man! Consider these tips: When you acquire a watch this should be represented on your character's wrist (like a black line) Also when you dive up, you usually tilt your head up, because right now your character just strait up looks straight haha. Love the progress, good luck on your journey!

Hey DevDuck, Dauphin is looking great, Definitely doesn't seem like a game where "dying" would fit in. I agree with your idea though. I think that will quickly teach the player that they can not use over their allotted oxygen. Losing their items is something that no player would want to do. I think that is a great idea.

In addition to what u said when running out of air, I would start to play some “drowning” or running-out-of-air noises a few seconds before you actually run out of air. Or start to make the vision blurry or fade in a (flashing) vignette from the side to show the lack of oxygen visually. The blurriness is also happening IRL when your brain doesn’t get enough o2. I would also let the player wait a few minutes before he can get back into the water if he actually “drowned”, so that there is a cooldown period for its body to get ready again for a dive

running out of air sounds good.... death would be too much for this cute, friendly game. maybe the player 'washes up' somewhere on the beach, a little ways away from where they initially dived, this way they would have to find their way back to collect their items that were lost... or maybe the items themselves randomly wash up in random places around the beaches so you can't just dive back down to get them... since the way you currently describe it, unless you are planning to completely destroy the items, the only real punishment is loss of diving experience.

Finally a new devlog!

the oxygen UI looks really good, but what i think would be a good addition is to make the timer flash red once it starts to get close to 0. great work so far though!

You should add currents to make it harder for some areas such as rip tides and so on

I love the idea of the watch face for a UI element. I didn't even know diving watches were a thing. But it was clear to understand without that knowledge.

I feel like the air gauged should be reversed, so empty is on the left, like how a gas gauge works.

I like the idea of dropping items when you run out of air, but losing diving experience seems like it would be frustrating.

I like the idea of the screen fading out when your air is low (like, 20 - 10 seconds left) and you might lose a percentage of the items collected while diving, after you wash up on the beach.

Brilliant work as always Ben! I love the divers watch! Especially the ability to switch between the different faces think it adds a lot - also think it could be cool to upgrade the watch later in the game to have more faces or maybe more details?

if weather is going to have a significant role in how the player will behave in the world you should add a little forecast on the watch so the player can plan ahead. Could be as simple as a small weather icon to the right of the current weather icon.

Thanks for changing to meters, appreciate it

Your work-life-creativity balance is honestly such a huge inspiration to me! Keep it up, man

I really like your idea with the watch. A option to change where it is on the screen would be very cool

Loved the watch faces for UI! About what to do when to oxygen runs out: I think your idea of the player losing some items is great! Maybe you could make an animation of the character swiming up and droping the items.

I like the watch, they look super cool. Also I would flip the Air bar. So the red is on the left, green on the right. The motion right to left makes it obvious you are depleting your oxygen. The Death could be made like you fell unconscious and some NPC rescued you and pulled you to the beach

The watch UI is a great idea and I think it fits really well with the game

Great work so far. A suggestion: Just have them swept onto a shore instead of having the player have to watch them swim up. This eliminates the dying aspect and enables items to be either scattered onshore or lost in the sea. It also saves a lot of time with code and maintains the gameplay aspect much more succinctly.

As a total nerd in the realm of scuba diving and as a dive shop employee I could go on and on with things I would like to see implemented into the game Just some general notes I thought while watching the video: 1. THANK YOU for not having the computer display O2 but instead having it display Air. Pure O2 has a MOD (Maximum Operating Depth) of 20 feet which means below 20 ft that air is poisonous. 2. It would be really cool to see more realism involved in terms of how long you bottom time would be. Right now the only factor of how long you can stay down is how much air you have but adding a NDL (no decompression limit) would be really cool but probably not feasible for this game. BUT not all hope is lost because you could add the effects of Boyles Law which is the effect of how the deeper you go the quicker the gas is used so at a surface level say 0 meters you are at one atmosphere of pressure but at 33ft/10m you are at 2 atmospheres of pressure so you'll use the gas 2x as fast as you used it on the surface and the deeper you go the faster it goes so on and so on. 3. for running out of air my idea would be the fact that running out of air while scuba diving would be a lung over expansion injury in real life. Implementing a simple version of that into the game in my mind would be a decrease in a bottom time in every subsequent dive. so maybe while free diving you can only hold you breath for 70% of you previous time. You could also keep the player from diving while they "heal" so maybe they are barred from diving for a few in game days. 4. Another idea that would be awesome in late game would be if you were able to get a rebreather. air consumption at that point really doesn't become an issue so the diver could dive for as long as they want as a reward for going so far in the game? sorry for a lot of rambling but just super excited to see where this is going! best of luck!

When you run out of air, maybe the fisherman fishes you out of the sea and helps you? So you'll 'wake up' in the fisherman's cabin. For the consequences, the fisherman could take away your dive flag if it happens multiple times, after which you have to prove to him that you can be responsible enough to get it back (aka, you get a quest)? But I like the washing up idea (that others have already suggested) as well. Maybe there could be a combination of the two: on inhabited islands you get fished out, on uninhabited islands you wash up. The consequences could then differ as well - if you lose more by diving at uninhabited islands you may want to avoid it more. Though I can imagine the rewards of diving at uninhabited islands could be greater as well. Downside is of course that it would be two systems to implement instead of one, which takes more time. Thank you for the wonderful videos!

I like these ideas! Also, it would be great if down to some underwater caves the player could find some air bubbles and refill his o2 even while in dive

Normally you dive with a partner, it's so if you run out of air you can share, that's why you have an extra breather hose

You should probably unhook the air from the UI and instead put it on the player and poll that. I'd keep both a maximum air, current air, and air consumption value on the player and pull those across to the UI. That will make your life easier down the line when you need to add new items that do things. You can have some that slow air consumption, some that increase maximum air, etc.

I think it would be cool idea if than rather have a timer on the air remaining UI have a percentage of air remaining for an extra layer of realism. Cool progress so far!

An idea you could add to your game is you could make it so people can find scuba gear and if you are wearing that scuba gear then your air lasts longer. And to make the scuba gear actually useful, make the players air run out faster if they're not wearing it.

I have no desire to make a game, but yet I love watching your videos as they soothe me. Keep up the amazing work!

When you're all out of exygen, being saved by dolphins is a cool idea, but if dolphins only come out to help you when you're about to drown, it'd stand out. Also, in terms of refilling air, you could make it so the safety flag shows up when your diving, and when you are using air tanks, you have to head to the flag and deliberately refill the air.

I think that's a good tradeoff in what happens when you run out of air. Only catch would be if people could stash their stuff on the boat or something. If they could, then they could game it by leaving all their items behind, then going for some kind of crazy death-dive to explore extra far or something like that, then not have any real penalty in lost items. Even losing dive experience wouldn't be much of a deterrent if they always have that base level of two-minute dive capability. I like the concept, just make sure it does not have exploitable edge-cases.

My first thought for a lose/death state in the underwater scene was something like pulling a cord on a lifejacket and quickly ascending

The watch faces are looking pretty slick! Only thing I think would improve them might be to swap the direction for the air gauge's empty/full indicator. Where red/empty is on the left and green/full is on the right instead. Meaning running down on air heads counterclockwise, and refilling again heads clockwise. I think this would just feel more naturally intuitive to the player.

I think the air timer should be reversed/flipped (green on the right, red on the left) - I think that looks more like a count-down rather than a count-up. Also - like you said about the dial tracking the players lung capacity? I dont think the watch should be able to do that, and instead something visual for the player sprite perhaps to show they're running out of breath? - cheeks turn blue or something? Unless dive watched have some mad technology in them I am unware of haha. Really love seeing the progress on your game.

An option for staying under too long: perhaps a message saying "you barely made it back and are a bit shaken up. it'll be a while before you're ready to dive again" and then mechanically, a hidden timer will start counting down before you're able to dive again. This would mean that rather than the game directly penalizing the player, they're instead inconveniencing themselves, and risking some opportunity cost. It's something most players will avoid like the plague (FOMO is a powerful effect), without feeling like a direct punishment.

I love your idea for what happens if you run out of air, and the dive watch looks awesome. Another great week of work!

The game is looking so nice! With the weather on the watch, would be awesome if the weather affects the environment somehow, or also a bit of the gameplay, like become hard to dive in days of storm. Liking so much these videos about the development of the game. :)

Rather than having the two indicators be tracking the same thing I feel it would be nice to have the timer be specifically for the oxygen tank when scuba diving, and the half moon shape for the ability of the player to hold their breath. When snorkelling they only get the half moon shape, whereas where they have an oxygen supply they have the timer, and when that runs out they go to the half moon shape which would work as a “reserve”, letting them know it’s time to start planning an ascent. If you plan to make these underwater areas more elaborate you may even have additional oxygen tanks they can pick up to reset the timer.

Nice to see the progress in the game and how the gameplay is evolving. Great job on the video once again and your place looks great as well. Video feedback: One thing I noticed, the audio of the video is on the lower side compared to other videos and ads. I found myself tweaking with the volume between ads and the content itself. Just a heads up! Beside that, top notch production as usual! Best wishes, Ben!

Great work, It's been awesome to see your game come together over the years. Looking forward to 2022!

Love the idea of a pixel based mini map on the watch.. PS i like the idea of keyboard short cut to hide the entire watch as well...

Great job! I really like the idea with the watch. I think there might be a UX concern about displaying Oxygen level and Depth on different faces and I would probably try to build a single face which would include both in a single face so both are handy without any interaction. Speaking of running out of Oxygen - fading out and then fading in already on the beach with the notification that some items are gone is a great way to make player watch those levels. I also love the idea of giving some sort of a debuff with some negative effects or even prohibiting diving for some time.

Just got caught up watching your dev logs. It sparked my interest in using Godot and building my own game, thanks!

Love seeing a new devduck video in my inbox - your content is always really enjoyable and motivating for me! Don't know how you have the time management skills to edit the videos as well as do everything else but it's seriously impressive!

A chemex? I see you, too, are a man of class. Kidding, but these updates look great! The diving system is a really cool and unique aspect of Dauphin and I'm excited to see how it continues to develop!

Love the series! I would suggest that the player, when idling underwater, has some small tween effect as is slightly bobbing up and down as the paddle. It'll add some movement to the idle state animation

It's lookin great! Nice work.

The punish system can be a blackout screen and you wake laying on the beach. You will be unconscious for a random time and there is a possibility to wake up in a bad situation. Maybe you have lost items, or there are enemies nearby and it's possible to wake up with everything being okay but it's a small chance.

I really like the idea of being able to increase your diving skill by experience/gear/ maybe training lessons. This is what keeps me engaged in a game. It would be awesome to be able to “buy” new watch faces as the game progresses. As you said, new maps or something like a sonar to detect useful objects underwater / metal detector for items on the shore. I think the watch could be a nice gameplay mechanic with more functionality.. anyways keep up the good work, already looking forward to the next episode.

love the dive watch, particularily the depth watch face

I think the consequences for running out of air should also depend on how deep you're diving. If you're free diving and near the surface, the panic surface is fine. But resurfacing from deeper places could introduce a "bends" mechanic that sets your character back a day (assuming the story accounts for daily progress). Even if there's no daily urgency, a log in the journal could show something like, "Day 12: Had the bends. I should probably watch my air better." But beyond that, some people suggested that a friendly NPC spots the character floating onto the beach. As much as I like that idea, I don't think it would make much sense on uninhabited islands. Perhaps the better method is to give our hero a sidekick who can offer suggestions, test equipment for functionality, and dive and rescue should the hero run out of air. The sidekick could hang out on the boat or the beach (after the corruption is cleared). Those are my thoughts.

The game is going great. I really like the watch faces, and the concept for running out of air. The one thing I'm not sure about is for the breath meter, the pixels of the pointer rotate so they aren't on the same rotation as all the other pixels. Might be fine, I'm not sure. If you were worried about pixel art for the pointer when it is diagonal, you could simplify it to one pixel. You could also change it to a straight line meter instead of a gauge. It also is probably fine the way it is. Great job, I'm excited for the next video!

I like the idea of the resurface at depleted Oxygen. I'd also consider flipping the air indicator. I've never seen a tank-indicator going from left to right. At least for me a full tank of gas is always to the right, but maybe I'm in a bubble.

I'm so excited for the release of Dauphin, the game looks so fun. Good luck!

I think it would be cool if the procedurally generated diving scene got deeper the further from shore you are when you dive. And then the further out you are when you run out of air, the more impactful the consequence.

you could have the player getting the bends from rising up to the surface too quickly and having his stats halved or something for a set duration, like a general debuff

I'm very happy that you changed from using o2 to using air since you don't breathe specifically o2 while diving (or most people in general since air isnt specifically oxygen and pure oxygen at depth can be real bad) :) Looks pretty good for a diving approach.

And later on you can add scuba gear and submarine for those deeper parts. The ideas for this game are limitless. Great job so far.

And also the watch shaking on some events like when left oxygen is now red level with some rate like a heartbeat

OMG, I love this! I'm marine biologist and I love Xenogears, Xenosaga, ff, and other rpgs, but this just melt my heart! 😩💖

I really like the idea of not dying directly and fading out while also losing some itens, maybe even lose some of your lung capacity so you have less time under water until you upgrade it again, perhaps you get penalized for the next few dives having some moments where the screen will randomly go black again like you are having a panic attack remembering or something like that... but yeah this game is looking really cool!

Hey, great devlog as always! I really love this series. One minor thing, although completely irrelevant: In your watch it looks like it reads "A:/" and not "Air". Maybe renaming it to "O2" would make more sense and maybe aesthetically pleasing? Also for the suggestion upon running out of oxygen: Respawn the player at the diving entrance location and give a timed debuff, maybe slower movement, or whatever you are going to implement in the future!

Suggestion: When he is swimming up. Have an animation with his hands above his head and moves down to his waist so it looks he is actually swimming up

Always enjoy these, looking forward to this one

I'm glad you changed O2 to Air. The most important function of a dive computer however is the ability to monitor the amount of inert gases like nitrogen stored in body tissue. It would be super complex to model this, but you might want to consider adding such a mechanic?

I think you should have a 'lung' capacity that increases on the surface and will 'level up' (and down when you run out and float to the top). On top of this, you should also be able to get dive gear and oxygen tanks - but these don't refill when you get to the top, you have to refill them some other way. This means you pick and choose when to use your dive gear if the certain dive facilitates it and adds a lot more 'skill' and adventure to the whole mechanic.

For the air indicator I would typically just parent it to a separate node 2d/control node and just rotate said parent node

For the final version of diving, I think a good approach for the amount of time a player gets when they are first diving is maybe 10-30 seconds? In my opinion it gives the sense to players that they want to work on getting better gear and that first experience they might sometimes panic trying to get back up to the surface which I think just makes would make the diving system more immersive.

I absolutely love the design!

Loved this video! I like how your pixel arts skills are getting evolve each episode haha I have a suggestion! Could you try make a smoother animation as the player goes deeper on they're way to dive? cause right now it seems like he is skipping steps on a stairwell... love your vids! :)

I like the idea of losing items when the timer runs out! Maybe the number of items you drop and the possibility of those items being items you’ve crafted can scale with how far you are in the game somehow, so that the consequence is equally punishing in the early and late game?

This guy has such a healthy lifestyle and is healthy, intellegent and fit, its so perfect and im so jealous your life seems so perfect 😭

Great video. One thing is that godot already has a built in texture progress bar that fills and unfills in a circular way like the oxygen gauge. U just need to change an option that in its settings

The vision could gradually become impeared (more blurry and darker) as time passes. It should feel like a hassle to stay under water for 1 minute even though you can technically survive 2 minutes, like in real life. By diving often you could improve your stamina under water and deal with the side effects better. In the current version the characters seem to swim up and down really fast, you can add a bit more sluggish acceleration to make it look more realistic. And some scuba gear wouldn't hurt :) If time passes the screen could go all dark and the character goes into uncontrollable panic mode. When he surfaces you can regain control, but he refuses to dive again for a certain time, also his underwater skills can become impaired by his near death experience.

This is freaking awsome , I love it!

2:16 thats a big flex (pun intended)

maybe also make the player wash up on the shore of the current island? maybe not even the area of the shore they left before diving, so they’d have to look for the spot they were exploring for a while. in this case you could also not just take some items away from them, but take all but the tools/key items and spread them around the area the player washes up on.

I love the new music. Also cool devlog!

I'm only at 3:34 but wanted to point out that the font for the O2 readout has a different 2 than in the numbers 0-9 list you created. As a side note, you could use this as your way of displaying health as well. Super Mario 64 used water as a health restore when you surface. That could be something to work in. Also the watch doesn't have to be displayed at all times. It could just pop up when damage is taken or when you enter the water.

Looks very nice!

Hey , i'm an actual scuba diver and your game looks really cool

I think it would be more aesthetically pleasing if the air visualisation would rotate counter clockwise. I think that's how count down timers usually work? 🤔

the word "Air" on the watch face reads as "A:r" because the stem of the "i" is only 1 pixel tall (should be 2).

I'm looking forward to playing this game!

I think you should lift up a little the rotation point of the indicator on the air watch face, and make the oxygen recharge quickly at first then more slowly (like in real life where we can take a deep breath)

Two suggestions: (1) Consider "windy" more a modifier than actual "full" weather state as it may be combined with sunny/cloudy/rainy/etc. weather (similar with night/day cycle); (2) Losing experience from failed dive is quite unrealistic, as experiencing bad outcomes first-hand tends to give us even more experience furter on (although giving more exp for such failure may be iappropriate game-wide). I would prefer to see some another modifer with either psychological (e.g. water/diving anxiety) or physical (e.g. decompression issues due to rapid ascent) condition, that makes harder/impossible for player to dive for some limited time.

The divers watch is a neat UI element, everything about it looks really cool! Edit: I saw that someone else already wrote a comment on the indicator positioning code. I thought about the code you have shown at around 8:20. If you place a Position2D node in the middle of the half circle (sort of where "Air" is written) as a pivot point and add the indicator texture as child node to Position2D, you only have to give the texture node an initial offset position to the left, so the indicator is set to "full". Then the process function only needs to calculate the rotation angle based on the elapsed time and rotate the pivot position by that amount. This should automatically rotate the indicator texture along the half circle. Wouldn't that be simpler than calculating the position and rotation?

DevDuck showing off the WRX in the background 👀