Orcastra's Cavern
Orcastra's Cavern is an underwater zone in Hidden Harmony that is teeming with life including singing fish, jazzy coral, and geysers that let you move quickly in the space while also getting breathtaking views of this unusually colored aquatic biome. In this creation, I was challenged to bring life to our game that was outside of our scope of characters. On top of creating the fish and flora, the challenge of integrating this dense, large underwater area into a game with no loading screens presented a towering task.
Orcastra's Cavern is a massive space compared to the other areas. It's located in front of and under the hub where the player starts, and can be accessed via a tunnel that drops straight into the water.
There are singing angelfish, jazzy coral, and musical gifts to plunder if you can complete the aquatic acrobat challenges.
This area is inhabited by the island's caretakers. These custodians look much like coral and can be found swimming alongside the ocean's creatures.
The coral are not just for show, either. In keeping with the theme of Hidden Harmony, each coral will sing a unique tune if you touch them.
Our lead artist gave direction on the dramatic colors that make you think you might be swimming in lava. In keeping with the tone of the music, the vibrant colors help capture the intensity of the instruments and ambience used for the space.
Having diversity of life was important, so I made developed various species of fish using a base template I created. The coral were made using a skin mesh modifier applied to a skeleton of each design.
The fish move through the space using a tool that guides them along a curated path. Each path has sets of fish cluster prefabs that have been scripted to start at different points in time on the track's loop.
The fish have use a flag shader repurposed for the motion of swimming. I edited the shader to take advantage of GPU instancing so that each fish is instanced at a unique swimming rate, creating a more realistic groups. This was used on the kelp as well!
To get to the cavern, you enter a cave below the waterfall going into the game's hub area. When you enter, you will immediately be submerged in water and dropped to the bottom. The transition to this area is seamless.
Moving around down here is easy with the geysers that shoot players high in the water, where they can then gently float down to their preferred landing spot. Thus, the hidden artifacts and challenges in this area are based on getting to high places.
Leaving the cavern requires you take this geyser that shoots you straight out of the water and into the sky.
Coming up with this exit took many redesigns. We had a coral stairway that was in a separate, smaller cavern. We also used the same cavern and smaller geysers to platform up and down. Nothing felt better than going straight through the belly of the beast.