Instead of making the submarine handle better, we changed the most terrifying creatures to be drawn to sound, which meant you now had to be quiet to avoid attacks. Once we started thinking of the Cyclops as facilitating an experience, instead of gameplay, the design suddenly started falling into place. Suddenly, we could make the player feel hunted. In Subnautica terms, that meant feeling scared, hearing ominous sonar pings, hearing and seeing creatures through the observation window, and hiding in the dark. Our new way suddenly became 'make the Cyclops a tense and delicious experience'. We also wanted player skill to be an element. In Subnautica terms, that meant gating, challenge, resource management and some timing. Our old way of thinking was 'make the Cyclops fun and gameplay-rich'. These clips gave us the seeds of thinking about the Cyclops in a totally new way. They are sitting in the dark, far from the surface, and virtually holding their breath, hoping that they don't die in the next few moments: We loved this tense waiting ambience in Hunt for Red October:Īnd who could forget this scene from U-571, where the crew turns off their submarines engines to evade a torpedo. First we took a step back to get inspired from the great submarine films. One of our programmers ( Scott Thunelius) and I were trying to figure out how to get ourselves out of this mess. So that left us nning away? Where's the fun in that? But how were players supposed to react? We had already decided to make a non-combat game, so fighting was off the table. We also had these big creatures that we wanted players to be scared of.

But we knew there must be a way to make it a nicer experience. We had already built the world with this pacing in mind and already released it, so we didn't want to rework the basics it or remove it entirely. But driving a clunky bus for hours at a time just to surpass a gate was tedious. We had long considered its main purpose was as a gate - there was no other way to get to the deeper depths required to beat the game.

But more than just the handling, its gameplay was really lacking a purpose. It drove like a bus compared the Mini Cooper like Seamoth. And not just change it, but get a whole new understanding of it.Īt the end of 2016, we were really struggling to improve Subnautica's showpiece submarine, the Cyclops. If you're stuck finding a solution, change the problem. This is where you figure out how to solve a problem through a new understanding of the problem's context. One great technique from design thinking is the reframe.

Subnautica falling out of cyclops