Hello Everyone!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming Splintered Sea expansion! Today we’re going to talk about the expansion’s water simulation & some of its features.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2165710/Besiege_The_Splintered_Sea/

It’s always been important to us that if we ever added water to Besiege, it would need to be a more interactive & impactful experience for the player than simply a flat plane to sail a ship across. With that in mind, throughout the development of the Splintered Sea expansion we have tweaked and refined the water simulation to make it as fun, challenging and immersive as possible.

The Splintered Sea’s ocean features large waves that physically batter your ship about, making navigation challenging and causing ill-balanced machines to capsize. Constructing an aquatic machine presents different challenges to those faced on land and we’ll talk more about Building for Water in an upcoming post.

Ensuring immersive and satisfying interaction between player creations and the ocean was also very important to us. We wanted the water to react to your presence, creating a rippling wake-like effect as your machine moves and splashing when parts of your ship impact the surface. Splashes and spray are proportional to the magnitude of an impact, so striking the water with a large heavy object at high speed creates a much larger effect than something smaller and lighter at a slower speed.

Now, Besiege wouldn’t be Besiege without awesome explosions, so we wanted to give special attention to them in water as well!

• Bombs & Mines are powerful enough to physically impact water both above and below the surface. Above the ocean large explosions force the water downward, creating a temporary depression in its surface.
  
• Large explosions underwater create a big bubble that forces water (and anything caught in it’s wake) away from the explosion’s epicenter and then sucks anything nearby back in as the bubble collapses. This makes submarine warfare especially satisfying and immersive!
  
• Underwater explosions also thrust water upward, creating huge bulges on the ocean’s surface that cause damage to vessels caught in them.

That's all for today, but next week we'll be taking a deeper dive into The Splintered Sea's aquatic blocks and how they'll help you take on Besiege's formidable ocean!

Cheers everyone,
Von

If you haven't already, please consider wishlisting the expansion and check out the expansion's steam page for more information! :)