HADAL is a deep-sea exploration game about diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, built with Phaser 4 by slinto. You run a small research programme aboard a ship off Guam, and your goal is to reach the bottom of Challenger Deep, almost 11,000 m down and the deepest place in the ocean, photographing the life of the deep on the way.
"Real dive physics and real species with sources; invented creatures are always labelled."
How HADAL Works: Real Dive Physics and Real Deep-Sea Species
The physics is the game. Your submersible sinks on its own under steel weights; you drop them to rise, and the battery has to last the whole way back up. Every new species you photograph well brings grants and reputation, which you spend on better equipment and deeper sites. You learn the controls during the dive, and a Handbook has the details.
There are 45 real deep-sea species in the game, each with sources, and any invented creature is always labelled as such. There is no combat and no timers: the challenge is the descent itself.
Lighting, Normal Maps and Synthesised Audio in Phaser 4
slinto shared a few Phaser 4 details from the build that other developers might find useful:
- Lighting: a light map covers sunlight that fades with depth, the lamp cone and caustics near the surface, and is applied to the scene through a camera Blend filter.
- Normal maps from pixel art: normal maps are generated automatically from every pixel-art sprite. Normals do not flip with setFlipX, so each sprite also gets a mirrored texture.
- Additive glow: with setForceComposite, the camera is composited through alpha, so additive light darkened the scene. Drawing the glow into a DynamicTexture with BlendModes.ADD fixed it.
- No sound files: all the audio is synthesised live with Web Audio.
HADAL is free to play in the browser on desktop and mobile, with no ads and no sign-up. slinto would love to hear where it gets confusing or boring.
Dive into HADAL
Free in your browser, on desktop and mobile. Pilot the submersible and see how deep you can go.