BoatyBoats

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  Sail into the sunset...

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  Or run amok

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  Yarrrrr

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  Ahoy!

Inspiration

Jason and the Argonauts, sailing the California coastline, Mario Kart

What it does

Race a small boat with realistic sailing physics. Multiplayer and mixed-platform. Compete in VR with your friends on mobile and desktop to complete a 3 point sailing race (go around the red buoys 3 times).

Use hand pinch or controller grip to sheet in and out the main sail (the rope going to one hand). Steer with the tiller (the brown bar at the back of the boat). Tap the controllers to swap hands. It's a lil weird - find someone who has sailed before or try it on mobile/desktop first to get the hang of things.

How we built it

We're three friends who have been hacking on stuff in three.js, blender, and IWSDK on our nights and weekends over the last month. Beers, prototypes, and fast iteration!

Challenges we ran into

• Time. This is still very much an early prototype, not a polished game experience.
• Steep learning curve with Blender! Animations and rigging are hard.
• Cloudflare's resource accounting for websockets (don't forget to hibernate those sockets =/).
• Still figuring out how to do post-processing effects with the IWSDK render pipeline (and what the compute budget allows for on many devices).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Physics model of the sailboat that feels like my experience sailing a small laser sailboat.
• Cross platform play makes this very accessible and easy to share.
• The compute shader for water within the view frustum with non-linear heightmap sampling was an interesting technical challenge. Allows for additions of arbitrary wavelets in scene with physical interaction between water and other objects (e.g. grass).

What we learned

All three of us are on different learning journeys. Nick is early on his journey with programming, and has been learning some of the basics of game programming and web technologies. Cory has years of experience with CAD software, but is diving into artistic asset modeling for the first time with Blender. I (Ruben) have lots of experience with graphics programming over the years, but this is the first time I've used web technologies to make a game.

What's next for BoatyBoats

• Tutorial, tooltips.
• Audio + non-prototype assets.
• Better matchmaking.
• Improve controls and sailing experience.
• Building out a larger game experience with sea creatures and different kinds of levels.
• More play mechanics, not just sailing. Players on boats should be able to man the cannon, climb the crows nest, throw grapnel hooks and board other boats. Crates, bananas, obstacles, etc. a la Mario Kart for the races.
• Optimization and making it look good (it's very much a prototype right now).
• Launch some time in 2026!

Built With

• blender
• cloudflare
• handtracking
• immersivewebsdk
• iwsdk
• three.js
• typescript
• webgl