Neptunium

Ocean swell rendering, with physics-based boat controller

Neptunium began as an experiment in shader-based ocean swell rendering. It was a good opportunity to explore new shader techniques, including using the depth buffer to approximate underwater visibility.

From there, I started prototyping some ocean-focused gameplay. The first major step was developing a boat controller capable of navigating the moving water surface. This proved challenging, as the physics simulation couldn’t directly access the ocean data running on the GPU. To overcome this, I created a CPU-side sampling function that approximated the same wave calculations as the shader, allowing the boat to interact with the ocean.

In the end, I decided that building a full game around this system was more than I wanted to take on as a solo developer, so I wrapped up the prototype and moved on to the next project.