Back from holidays
Hi guys! Daniel here, back from the holidays and today I will be talking about what I have been working on since I came back and my current plans for the upcoming weeks.

Particle effects!
Yes! Oh how I love particle effects. I haven’t got that much experience with particle effects but I have had a blast playing around with it. So far I have created a scene where I have put some effects on display, I have added things such as bubbles, weeds and different kinds of fish. I have got to say that it does make the scene come to life and I am really excited about putting all of this into our VR scene and see how all of this looks in VR.

So what I have been doing here is adding different kinds of particle effects, I have added schools of different fish and they all behave differently. There are some fish that just swim around a certain area, there are some fish that swim quickly in a direction and we also got the jellyfish swimming upwards.

In this scene I have also added bubbles around the corals and the boat and on the sand I have also added some grass and some kelp. All this is just small things that all add up to make this scene come alive. With the addition of our actual 3D fishes I think the experience will be even better.

I am pretty happy with how it all turned out and I learned a lot as well! At first all the fish shared the same behaviour and just by a quick glance I thought that turned out pretty neat, but it was not before I tried out different behaviours I saw the huge difference it made. The goal off all off this is to make it interesting to look around and to explore the sea, and I will continue to polish and add things until I feel I have accomplished that.

Plans for upcoming weeks
Okay so what now then? Well as mentioned above, there will be some testing in VR to see how all the particle effects look and through that we will see if there is something else i need to work on regarding the particle effects.

Some thoughts I have also been having is to try and see what I can do with light. I am a sucker for god rays/sun shafts, and I think it would look beautiful if i would be able to add some nice effects with the light. But not only would it look nice, If I am able to pull it of I hope it will further add to the “underwater” feeling, and that is exactly what I am aiming for in every aspect when it comes to effects. I want to enhance the feeling and I want to strengthen the immersion of being deep under the sea.

Other than that I will continue to work on player feedback, and that includes polish to the controllers, vibrations, visual effects, you name it. I am still working on polishing the shutter effect, it’s a big effect and since it is in VR it just needs to feel right, I don’t want it to be annoying or to disorient the player.

And that’s all I got for you this time! Thanks for reading and I will be seeing you soon.

// Daniel