Worldmaking with Unity

Week 1 - Inspirations and Map

While visiting a friend in Gainseville, Florida back in 2018, we took a trip to Ichetucknee Springs, a natural lazy river that sections off into swimming holes and underwater caves. I took a peek under the water and was fascinated by the crack in the ground that led into the aquifer and cave system beneath.

Not long after this trip I attended the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and saw Under a Cracked Sky, a VR documentary about divers underneath the Antarctic sea ice. The film was a beautiful and immersive experience, and even years later I remember this short film.

I'm also heavily inspired by stories set in science fiction settings, especially space fantasies as they're such a fun sandbox to play in. I love the films Alien, Star Wars, and Fifth Element, as well as the games Knights of the Old Republic, Outer Worlds, Doom, Astroneer, SOMA, and the Mass Effect series.

With these inspirations, I want to create an underwater cave system that is subtly alien, not of this Earth. I want to have fauna, fish, and insects that are familiar but strange, such as the examples below that are mostly real plants but do not feel like they exist.

I am mostly a 2D artist but would like to improve my skills in 3D, and so I want to challenge myself to make this game only with 3D assets. I've found some modular cave assets on the Unity store that I believe would allow me to create this underwater system, as well as some flocking animations for fish and shaders for water. I would like to try modelling a few alien fauna in Blender to improve on my skills in that program.

I want the cave system to feel as if humans have recently started to inhabit it: they've fled underground due to turmoil on the planet's surface and have rarely resurfaced the past decade. With this I want to add elements like a metal makeshift ramp into the water, as well as some things that might be hanging in the cave system like wind chimes. I think a halocline would be interesting to add, but might be too confusing in a 3D modeled environment.

My stretch goal is to have two children travelling in the underwater caves, a brother and sister taking a trip outside of their community to look at a sparkling ceiling full of crystals and glow worms, the sister telling the brother that this is what it was like to look at the stars.

My ultimate stretch goal, if I end up having a ton of time to work on this, is to add a section after the crystal cave. I'd like for the brother character to wake up from this dream about his childhood in the caves, he's much older now and lives on a space ship with his daughter. I'd like for the both of them to look at the stars together out of the cockpit window, to resolve thematically his desire to see the sky.

For the figures of the characters, I was thinking of taking inspiration from the game Tacoma, where the characters are all colorful holograms and have few distinguishing figures. Since there are free basic character controllers and 3D models on the asset store, I may take some "dummy" figures and make them glow so that you cannot distinguish much about them beyond their silhouettes.

For the map, I took inspiration from the Silver Glen Spring cave system since I'm not very familiar with how aquifers work. I took some liberties to make the cave more winding and twisting, though having some areas where the player can swim and breathe. The map starts on the left and ends on the right, the largest chamber being the crystal cave.