The Last Aquanaut Alpha 1 builds have been uploaded and made available for Mac, Windows and Linux! Let's talk a bit about the game and the direction I'm taking it in.

Original Concept:

In 2024 I stumbled upon the Nautilis Live, an organization of researchers, scientists, engineers and science communications that sail the seas and dive into the depths using two Remote Operated Submarine Vehicles called Hercules and Atalanta. During the streams you can hear the entire crew working together and exploring the bottoms of the ocean up till 6000 meters or about 20K feet in depth. And I love hearing their excitement and glee with every new thing that came into their view. Pretty sure I spent hundreds of hours following the streams and I wanted to replicate that feeling and joy of discovery.

In the original concept the Last Aquanaut was called Aquanauts and it started as a cockpit based underwater colony builder in which you'd build up your base of survivors after the ending of the world. I'm 90% sure this is the only screenshot left from that version of the game but it gives a good idea where it started:

You'd drive your "HoverBike Sub" picking and gather salvage and resources to build a colony underwater. It was decently fun but 90% of the time and energy was spent in the colony sim aspect of the game. And I couldn't get close to the joy of discovery that I was chasing so much. After about 3 months I retired the colony sim parts of the game and just kept the cockpit navigation aspect. The Resource-Based AI and building module code is still in the game and I might just expose most of the code to modders later on. 

Road to the current version:

Since a image is worth about 1000 words and a video si a couple thousands images, I'll let the following videos explain how the game progressed (and in some cases regressed) to the version out today:

And there's a fully capable and quite fun companion AI system in the game that can and will try to self balance itself on a PickAxe module if given the chance. I spent about half of the development time trying to get a companion working and feeling nice within the game to help you explore - and it did get to a pretty decent and beautiful state (as you can see in the next video). But I don't think it will play a role in the game, unless I'll add it as extra upon completing the game at least once. Still - pretty fun and happy to have gotten it working.

On Alpha 1 and 2:

The reason I'm doing a Alpha 1 with limited and cut content is because a lot of the systems presented above are dependent on how the player interacts with the world and how he traverses it. I want to provide the player with a experience of adventure and exploration infused with a feeling of loneliness and pressure, of discovery by the seat of your pants, of near misses and barely making it, but post main story? My plan is to bring back most of the systems presented above and unlock them for those who want to have a little bit of fun with the game after completing it. And a lot of these systems are useful inside of the main story - but again - If I integrate them back now and I change how the player interacts with the world down the road, I'll have to integrate them again later. 

This is why Alpha 1 is up here. With Alpha 1 and your feedback I'm hoping to solve a lot of the headache's of designing in a vacuum and for myself so I can focus on the experience of being underwater vs the experience of navigating underwater. 

Glad to finally be at a point in which I can share this videos and tidbits of information with other people. Working on this game for a year in almost full seclusion has been really draining. 

P.s. you can clearly see the art style evolve into the current version, I haven't even noticed the clear path haha!