Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia (2021): Putting Myself in Fish Hell

Bryce Bucher on Making Too Many Fish

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Hello, my name is Bryce Bucher. For the purposes of this essay, the only things you need to know about me are that I made a fishing game with light horror elements called Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia and that I have crippling executive dysfunction. I make a frequent habit of putting myself into ambitious art projects that, at some point or another, require me to take on a tedious workload that my brain is just not built to accomplish in a healthy way. As such, the most memorable part of developing my, as of now, latest commercial release was when I wittingly ensnared myself into the gaping maw of a fresh fish hell.

The apple of my eye

The process began with a list of roughly 34 or so fish which I, naively, assumed would be a pretty manageable number. I am consistently learning through the process of developing games that numbers are always a lot bigger than you think they are. Incidentally, another thing I keep learning that I will never learn. After creating this list, I figured the easiest bottleneck to optimize during this whole ordeal would be the rigging process. You see, to a dope like me, all fish seem to wiggle about in a similar manner. As such, I figured that a single rig consisting of four bones would get the job done.

If you are unfamiliar with 3D animation pipelines, a rig is typically a set of virtual bones that you place inside of a model, and the vertices of the models are influenced by said bones such that they are moved around to roughly simulate a skeletal system. As far as rigs go, this one is as simple as they get. A single bone for the face, and then three bones extruding down the body so that I can make the little guys wiggle about. After setting this bad boy up, I got myself trying to think up the perfect platonic ideal fish to act as the genesis for my descent. Eventually, I settled on a classic green bass and got to modeling. I must admit my memories of this whole process are a little fuzzy on account of my brain being a hyper-fixated mush for most of it, but I seem to recall this original model being the most difficult to create out of all of them, say for maybe the stoplight loosejaw. I hadn’t really modeled a proper fish before, and it was a bit of a foreign shape to me. Regardless, I pressed on with my usual organic-modeling process in which I start with a single 3d plane and begin extruding various vertices and edges in order to mold the little freak into creation.

The next, and arguably most important, part of creating these damn fish was to texture them. Since Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia is styled after late 5th generation console games, that means that the textures for these fish were all going to be a mixture of digital painting and photo-source editing. This is my favorite way to texture anything, but I was also very aware that this was going to be the most time consuming part of the whole process. As these things tend to go, the first fish ended up being the one I spent the most time on. For the bass texture, I created a color gradient to match the pink to white to yellowish green to green body of whatever type of bass this is. After that, I found some photos of scaly fabric and overlaid them on top of this gradient in order to simulate the disgusting skin of this beautiful creature. I also overlaid some simple stripes and used the liquify tool in Affinity Photo to warp them around a bit. After that, I copied pieces of this main chunk of texture and used them to create a few different fin shapes. The final step was to paint a little face on the guy and use some layer effects and simple shapes to make an eyeball. I, of course, then went through the process of placing the texture on the model while clenching my teeth in anticipation of figuring out whether or not all this was worth it. Luckily it was! The fish came together and practically looked like I could kill and eat it if I wanted.

Wow that sure was a lot of work. Only 33 more to go. After creating the bass I quickly realized this virtuous work ethic was in no way sustainable for a healthy soul, so I started cutting corners as much as artistically viable. Most every single fish’s model was just a version of the bass model with a slightly modified shape. I was able to take similar shortcuts with the textures of most of the fish, but not to the same degree. For most fins I was just able to do a simple recolor of the bass’, and for certain fish like the piranha I was able to find public domain photos of them taxidermied. The process took a couple weeks I think, and it got to a point where it was not even a little bit enjoyable. Even creating more unique sealife like the mantaray, angler fish, and scallop was largely joyless as the granularity of my individual tasks began to form an hourglass that would not stop flowing. As it always goes, the hardest part of finishing this game was finishing it, and I inevitably gave myself a bit less to finish. I cut around three or so fish from the final game. Unfortunately, they were probably the coolest fish I had planned, but that just meant they required completely unique assets that I just didn’t have it in me to make at the time. It was only after I had gained some distance from the process, and got to see all the various little fellas I made swimming about, that I was able to fully appreciate the work that went into it. I was (and still am) a bit surprised that the fish ended up feeling as varied as they do given how much of them were just mutated bass.

Okay that’s it, go away.

Oh wait hold on the bounty.

My Bounty

I have so many games I would love to make. One that's been on my mind lately is a first-person mech game that uses relatively unintuitive on-screen controls in the vein of System Shock (1994). The controls would all be placed diegetically on a pre-rendered ui frame that encapsulates the gameplay window. I really love the way the original System Shock controls, and I feel as though most people who play games don’t give unconventional control schemes enough patience. I think that by ‘properly’ contextualizing the sort of awkward, granular controls that, to me, make up roughly half of System Shock’s charm, I can open up a window that will let more people see the joys of moving around like a big, chunky robot.

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