2026 Week 33: learning to swim

Four seasons

The plan with 'Escape the 11th Terminus' has always been to split the world into four. Essentially quadrants. Each quad bringing its own challenges and environment. One of those challenges has always been water.

Doing water convincingly in a 2d game is tricky if you don't set some ground rules first. In terms of performance we were never going to be able to achieve true fluid dynamics. So we needed to aim for using layers and tricks to achieve the effect that water can move around like we do in the corridors.

That's what we've done with Water v1. It is limited to rectangular regions, but within those regions we can get things working pretty well. The addition of splashing effects and good sounds goes a long way to adding believability.

Underwater

Not only is it a good film, it is an area we've spent a long time working on. There are still glitches to overcome —as usual— but we believe we've done enough work so far for water to be a pretty nice addition to the level building tools.

At the moment it is possible to have regions the rise and fall triggered by game world events. Water can act as a hinderance but also an aid. We have yet to test our puzzles with anyone outside of our team, but water is one of those things that really helps adding a 'oh... i see' moment.

Warping and particles

It is always surprising how small effects can bring big feeling. It is one of the reasons why we love working in 2d. As soon as you switch to 3d everything becomes harder in achieving escapism. But 2d has this magical quality that can pull you into the game, just as much as 3d, but with a lot more simple tricks. Whilst we do need to be careful on how many effects we layer, we have to keep our baseline frame-rate. As long as we add these with modular systems, then if we ever do get to hot for certain deviecs to handle players can disable any effect that is causing their setup issues.

Animation

Surprisingly the animation went very quickly for the swimming actions, and we're still not sure why. By any rights it should have been harder than rolling, but for some reason it wasn't. There are still rough edges to some of the frames, which we will fix at some future point. Our admin still isn't optimised for going back over animations, the create -> bake process is straightforward. But when it comes to reload -> tweak -> rebake there is always a risk it will mess up the bridge wiring. So we do have to be careful.

Limitations

So, the way water works now, it is obviously confined to corridors and fixed regions. It can't go spilling from one room to another. But, we already have some plans in place to try and get around this, at least in some areas, that will involve visual trickery. It might work, it might look terrible.

For now we're happy just playtesting jumping in and out of the water line, and perhaps that's enough.