In Progress: A Submarine Thing

20 Aug 2025

Postin' some in-progress Godot stuff I'm toying with.

Dive Dive Dive

I got the hankering at some point to make an underwater exploration game, kinda’ like an Endless Ocean. A chill game where you can roam around and see cool things underwater. So I grabbed the latest Godot 4 branch, popped open Blender, and got to it. And I also opened Ultimate Doom Builder.

My plan here: Use a Blender material called Clay-Doh to create weird looking fish models, then I can import those in and place them in levels modeled out in Ultimate Doom Builder. UDB has a model export option for levels so I can quickly draft a level layout, export it with textures, and either pop it straight into Godot or bring it into Blender for cleanup. My experience so far, you’ll need cleanup if you’re doing this.

^{Test underwater map made in Ultimate Doom Builder. Click for larger image.}

^{Test underwater map in Blender, it has been cleaned up from the UDB export. Click for larger image.}

For test purposes, this is enough. I had to delete the polygons on the “roof” of the map so the skybox could be seen from within the map. Unfortunately, even if you use F_SKY on your Doom map it will still appear as a solid roof.

Fsh

Next up, something to put in. I’d been doing some playing around with the Clay-Doh materials after I picked them up in a bundle, let’s see how weird of a fish I could make.

^{Butthole fish.}

Butthole fish. Perfect. It’s goofy enough, I can bake some maps and bring this in to Godot while retaining its clay-like look. Let’s see how that looks!

^{Butthole fishes in Godot scene. Click for larger image.}

Ignoring the white textures that I haven’t configured yet, I’ve got an issue. The right fish isn’t using any normal maps and is solidly-lit as expected by the camera’s attached spotlight. The left fish, though, is using a normal map to try and match the same lumpiness observed in Blender. There’s also a third fish using a displacement map to obtain similar lumpy geometry via shader, but that’s currently broken!

You can’t do too much other than move the “submarine” around and light up the level where you’re looking. I set up the Godot scene environment so everything has a blue tint over it for that underwater lighting feel, so at least it’s got some good vibe while I’m working and testing it.

I hit a roadblock of the normals acting weird with lighting and fell off the project, but I do wanna’ come back to it. Maybe I’ll forego doing the whole Clay-Doh look and find another way to make fish look funny. If I do more work, I’ll be sure to say something!