Depths of Sanity
Development Update 5/12/21
We wanted to give a quick update since we've been pretty silent since the release of Chapter 4 at the end of March.
Since the release, we've had our heads down making as much progress as possible on the next chapter. One of our teammates has a baby on the way (due any day now!) so we've been pushing to get ahead on as much as possible before he takes some much needed rest.
Luckily, it's been working out.
That said, we don't have anything awesome to show you guys right now of the next Chapter ( we're in the very unsexy part of the development) but hopefully we'll be able to provide you with a bigger update and some visuals around the start of June, along with what you can expect that Chapter to bring.
Thank you for all who've been playing Depths during this time and giving us feedback – definitely continue to leave it here, on Discord, or DM us on Twitter. We will likely have a patch before the release of Chapter 5 to address any bugs we get.
Lastly, we wanted to thank those of you who've been kind enough to leave Steam reviews. They have been SUPER helpful for us (every time we get one we see a spike in eyeballs and new people entering early access) and we really appreciate it.
Anyway, we hope you're all doing well, and we'll talk again soon.
- The Bomb Shelter Games Team
Depths of Sanity Grows With The Release of Chapter 4!
Big News: Chapter 4 of Depths of Sanity has arrived in early access, and it brings a whole lot of new features, levels, and more to the game. Check out the launch trailer here:
[previewyoutube="2DJNPKcs0gg;full"]
If you’ve already been playing along with us, we hope you enjoy the next chapter! But if you’re new, here’s what you’re in for:
Depths of Sanity is an underwater metroidvania nightmare. You play as Abe Douglas, a Commander in the G.O.A.A. tracking down the Baroness, a submarine staffed by his old crew that went dark while investigating a mysterious signal at the bottom of the ocean.
The entire game takes place under the sea, flipping a lot of the usual metroidvania mechanics on their head. There are no double jumps to save you here. Instead, you’ll use unique tools like diver suits to squeeze through tight areas, sonar to guide you through pure blackness, and tow lines to yank you through heavy currents, and, if you’re feeling frisky, send yourself flying into your enemies.
The first three chapters entered early access on Halloween, and while we’ve made steady updates, Chapter 4 brings a lot of new things to the table, including two all-new environments - The Dying Reef and Tectonic Rift - and a host of new features like fast-travel, improved HUD and visual upgrades, accessibility options, and more.
It’s a giant update, and this week only, you can get Depths of Sanity for $13.50. That’s cheaper than our standard Early Access price, and significantly cheaper than our final launch price (which will be $20).
Take the plunge and grab your copy here.
And we definitely want your feedback, so while you’re playing, make sure you send us your thoughts either on our Discord, Steam Discussion Board, or DM us on Twitter.
A full list of changes from the previous build can be found in our patch notes: Patch Notes
Thank you for all of your support!
The Bomb Shelter Games Team
Chapter 4 comes to Depths of Sanity on March 22nd!
Hey Everyone,
Chapter 4 is coming to Depths of Sanity on March 22nd, and it is a MASSIVE update that’s bringing A TON of new content to the game.
First off, this Chapter packs two new areas for you to explore - The Dying Reef and the Tectonic Rift. Check out a few clips in this preview video:
[previewyoutube="0uAc5ojGoVA;full"]
The Dying Reef will have you traversing puzzles with your newly acquired tow line and getting help from a few aquatic friends along the way, and the Tectonic Rift stands as the game’s biggest level to date, taking you deep inside an underwater volcano to throw all sorts of new challenging enemies and obstacles in your way - including areas hot enough to peel your ship apart.
In addition to bringing along two new environments, there’s a host of additional features coming along, including:
- Fast travel
- An improved HUD and visual upgrades
- Additional control schemes and accessibility options
- Quality-of-life improvements such a dedicated map button, audio log menu, and more
[previewyoutube="NzQUNWeMjZs;full"]
It’s a giant update, and to those of you who took the plunge with us on Early Access, your feedback has helped immensely in improving the game for this next Chapter.
And if you’ve just been keeping tabs on us, we’d LOVE it if you joined us with this chapter update - that’s why Depths of Sanity will be discounted to $13.50 for Chapter 4’s launch week. That's cheaper than our standard Early Access price, and significantly cheaper than our final launch price (which will be $20).
Wishlist us here to be notified when the chapter drops, and we’ll be back soon with the official launch trailer for Chapter 4!
See you then,
The Bomb Shelter Games Team
Weekly Update 2/23/21
Glad to be back! We’re gearing up for a HUGE look at Chapter 4 next week (dropping on March 19th!) but in the meantime, here are a few quick bites of what we've been up to.
Over on our Twitter, we’ve been showing a lot of the less glamorous side of game making, including creating the first-pass of our audio log menu, or dealing with a very irritating bug with our tow line (took a lot longer to fix than we’d like to admit lol).
Last month we had a fun time at BostonFig, and we were delighted to be included FICTiVETRUiSM’s round-up of his Top 5 Picks from the BostonFig Fest. It’s always such a boost to see something like this about our game - particularly from an outlet like indiegamereviewer.com.
And lastly, this past weekend we dropped the first snippet of one of Chapter 4’s new environments - Tectonic Rift. This area takes place in an underwater volcano and features a bunch of nasty new obstacles, including areas hot enough to peel your hull apart. Here’s a snippet of us working on one of the lava gushers below:
[previewyoutube="bKaCqy3PHlw;full"]
Next week, we’re going to do a full drop on Chapter 4 - showing what new environments, tools, unlocks, and quality of life improvements will be coming on March 19th.
See you then!
The Bomb Shelter Games Team
Weekly Roundup - 2/7/21
Here is the start of our weekly round-up - a quickie blog showing some of what we’ve been working on this week.
On Tuesday we promoted an interview our writer Nick did with BostonFig two weeks ago. It’s a quick 15 minutes, and if you want to know what it’s like having to write an indie game that was already in development for years, you’ll learn some interesting stuff (and don’t worry, there are no spoilers for Depths of Sanity).
[previewyoutube="ofFqKW3v9JM;full"]
If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you’ll have seen us post the work-in-progress of Bennett slowly designing the final inventory HUD for the game for the past few weeks. This week we finally implemented it in the game and dropped a clip of it. This, along with several other graphical enhancements, will show up when Chapter 4 releases on March 19th.
[previewyoutube="T6Cy_cZ3DlY;full"]
And lastly, we dropped a fun snippet of a player getting wrecked by a killer whale earlier in the game. Cause we’re sickos. Check that out here.
As usual, if you want to keep in touch, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord.
We'll be dropping a whole lot of information about Chapter 4 soon - can't wait to you show what we have in store!
Patch Notes Ver 0.1.3 - Gameplay Tweaks and Bug Fixes
Thanks to everyone who has been submitting feedback so far! This will be our last patch before our MASSIVE Chapter 4 drop on February 26th. More details to come! But for now, here are our latest updates:
Gameplay Improvements
- Added a scrolling text box to the document menu so the text no longer changes sizes to fit the text box
- Tweaked the timing on the skull obstacles
- New heat obstacle art has been added
Bug Fixes
- The harpoon now latches on to destructable objects (shells, coral, etc.)
- Fixed a timing issue with the first save point tutorial and a W3 dialog box
- Fixed an issue where the audio dials would sometimes snap to zero when opening the menu
- Fixed an issue where torpedo pickups were not granting you torpedos
- Added a barrier to prevent players from bypassing the World 2 boss and going to World 3 too early
Patch Notes: Ver 0.1.2 - Gameplay Tweaks and Bug Fixes
Thanks to everyone who has been submitting feedback so far! We're aiming to release a new patch every 2 weeks while we get Chapter 4 ready. This first patch includes:
GAMEPLAY IMPROVEMENTS
- Your selected weapon and equipment will now stay equipped between level/boss loads.
- Tab (select on controllers) now opens and closes the map directly, avoiding having to select it through the pause menu.
BUG FIXES
- The tutorial prompt for the sonar while using mouse and keyboard now has the correct key.
- Fixed an issue where you would not gain health if you picked it up while your shield was active.
- One way torpedo doors in World 3 now make the correct sound effect.
- Torpedo capacity updrades now have the proper text.
- Fixed some looping issues with certain music tracks
- The door in the World 3 Boss room now does damage, preventing an exploit where you could hide in the door and kill the boss without getting hurt.
- A hatching egg in World 3 no longer spawns invincible enemies.
- World 3 map has been updated to correct an error.
Making the Unsexy Stuff: Crafting Our Indie Metroidvania’s HUD
Most of the time, players don’t even notice it unless it’s actively getting in the way of their gameplay experience. And yet, a tremendous amount of time and man-hours go into making them. Creating a HUD that manages to convey the tone and style of a game alongside all of the information a player needs, WITHOUT getting in the way of their experience takes a whole lot of time, patience, and creativity.
So let’s talk about it.
Depths of Sanity - our underwater, metroidvania nightmare - just entered Early Access after 3.5 years of development, and it took a whole lot of refinement to get there. One of the hardest components for our artist was the HUD, which went through many redesigns over the course of development.
Our game takes place entirely underwater, with the player character Abe piloting a submarine for the majority of the game (except for sequences that take place in a diver suit).
Bennett, our artist, wanted to use that unique concept to drive the look and feel of our HUD and all of its elements, while still conveying information to the player quickly and simply.
Here is how he approached it:
Year One - Pre Alpha
The first HUD I made was designed to look like an old green monochrome monitor, as if you were reading the information off of the sub's screen. The concept was to make it seem like a “cockpit” view of the submarine’s vitals, and it was something that we tried to maintain across versions as it evolved.
One of our earliest story concepts had the ship’s computer as a villain, so we kicked around the idea of messing with the player's HUD as part of it. This lo-fi, almost DOS-like version allowed us to mess with the player in a lot of ways, allowing the computer to send you messages in the text of the HUD and override any of the information you were seeing.
However, we ultimately moved away from that story concept, and by extension, this HUD, which was visually dull and stylistically harder-to-read than it should’ve been (particularly the map in the upper right). So I tried again, using a classic as inspiration.
Year Two - Pre Beta
The second major revision lifted heavily from Super Metroid as a guidepost. The current version still largely follows that format, which helped me to focus and clean up how we showed important information to the player.
One of the things I wanted to do was have a full HUD from the start, but with many of the indicators not working - i.e. the empty cartridge slots, closed switches, etc. I thought it would be a cool way to build anticipation for what kinds of weapons and abilities would fill it out over the course of the game.
This build of Depths also had an additional HUD at the bottom of the screen that indicated which primary weapon was currently equipped. Some of them even had special animations that would play when the weapon was being used.
While I definitely liked this HUD from a pure artistic perspective, we wound up moving away from it. The lower portion took up too much screen space and was quite busy, limiting the player’s field of view without providing need-to-know information. Also, it was kind of redundant with the weapon wheel.
Speaking of which...
The Weapon Wheel
The weapon wheel went through multiple visual iterations during the first version of the HUD. The original concept was a drop down menu system, like you were finding and running a DOS program on a computer. Admittedly, I liked it a lot stylistically, but it was way too cumbersome to actually use. 
Sanity prevailed and we eventually swapped to a wheel format, but we were still using words to select the weapons, which was both unattractive and didn’t make sense with how the look of the ship was evolving.
Early versions of Abe’s ship had a gun on the side, and the gun would change based on the weapon selected. In this version, we used green silhouettes of those weapons instead of words for V3 of the weapon wheel ( you can see how this looked in the very first screenshot at the top of this page).
However, the look of the ship changed dramatically over development, eventually causing us to remove the visible weapon changes for a variety of reasons. The final change came our Early Access HUD.
HUD and Weapon Wheel Year 3 - Current Early Access Version:
This year, we wound up simplifying the HUD and the weapon wheel significantly. The wheel was paired down to simple icons to help you determine which weapon you were using (for instance, in the screenshot below, we use a “bouncing ball” icon for the Bounce Shot).
The overall HUD also got a lot of nips and tucks. The biggest was that we peeled away the bottom portion, freeing up space that we could use for different purposes as needed, such as revealing your oxygen gauge when you leave the ship, or giving more room for dialogue scenes.
Up top, we added a temperature gauge for the section of the game involving heat (previous players were confused about how the mechanic worked), expanded the edges for wider displays, and moved a few things around in order to better organize what remained.
I’m definitely pretty happy with this final compromise. This current HUD gives the game it’s own unique feel - keeping the idea of having a “cockpit” view of your vitals - while being much more useful and visually interesting.
Early Access
Now we’re in Early Access, and while the team is happy with the design, we’re still adding tweaks as people play through the game and give us feedback. It’s been a pretty enlightening experience to have players finally being able to sink into the game for hours and help us tailor it for the eventual full release. If you’d like to help us, you can get your Early Access copy here. Right now it contains the first 3 chapters of the game (out of 6), with Chapter 4 dropping in a few months.
Thanks for helping us, and we hope this gave you a bit of insight on how to arrive at a HUD that works for your indie game.
Depths of Sanity is Now in EARLY ACCESS!
Today’s a big day for the Bomb Shelter Games crew - Depths of Sanity has officially entered Steam Early Access!
[previewyoutube="mTAg5vLwPsU;full"]
Not only can you buy and start playing the first few chapters right now - we have an ADDITIONAL discount running for our Early Access launch week from now until next Friday.
It’s been a long 3.5 years, but this is a huge milestone for us, and we’re incredibly excited for you to see just what we’ve been working on through this horror show of a year. Wherever you first played one of our demos or saw something that made you check us out, we're thankful you've been keeping track of us over the years.
Of course, this is just the beginning of the next leg of the journey - working with you to improve and expand the game through early access to be the best it can be, and we can’t wait to build the full experience with you.
Get your copy of Depths of Sanity in Early Access here. While you play through it make sure you give us feedback on steam or discord! We'll be creating forums on both to get your thoughts on gameplay mechanics, level design, story sequences, and more.
So what happens next?
We'll be updating the community every two weeks with progress reports, as well as responding to your feedback as it comes in. We’ll be a little absent this week now that our crunch has subsided, but then work will begin again steadily. We’ll be implementing fixes and feedback every two weeks, with the goal of bringing you all Chapter 4 by the end of the year.
But right now, we're going to enjoy the moment, and have ourselves a day. You know what time it is...
Thank you for all of your support,
The Bomb Shelter Games Team
We're Going Early Access (Part 2) - Pricing, Perks, and More!
Hey Everyone,
Last month we told you the big news – Depths of Sanity is going Early Access on October 30th! We detailed how we came to the decision in this blog post, so definitely give it a read if you haven’t yet.
But now that we’re officially one month (!) away from our Early Access launch, we wanted to share with you some more information about what to expect on launch day:
LAUNCH CONTENT AND ROADMAP:
On October 30th Depths of Sanity will launch into Early Access. For the initial launch, you’ll be able to play the first 3 chapters (out of 6) to completion. They will contain all of the mechanics, story elements, boss fights, and secrets of the final game.
After this initial launch, the plan is to add-in player feedback and release the remaining chapters of the game every two months. Chapter 4 would come out by the end of December/early January, Chapter 5 by the end of February/Early March, with the final Chapter releasing somewhere in April/May.
Your save data will carry through the additional patches and chapter additions, which will add even more to previous sections.
For example, when we release Chapter 4, you’re not just getting a new biome and story segment - you’ll be uncovering new tools and weapons that can help you more deeply explore the previous sections. And, depending on player feedback, there may be additional enhancements that also release if we’re seeing a consensus from our audience.
The goal is to spend 6–8 months in Early Access fine-tuning the game and incorporating player feedback before the full launch. Of course, this could change if we receive overwhelming feedback that requires massive overhauls.
PRICING:
When Depths of Sanity goes into Early Access on October 30th it will be priced at $14.99. This will remain the price throughout the entire Early Access period, whether you’re one of our Day 1 supporters or decide to leap aboard once we release Chapter 5 a few months from now. The earlier you support us, the more feedback and influence you can have on the development of the game, but whenever you join during this period you’ll receive all additional chapter updates for free, alongside bonus modes that will launch with the full game such as a boss rush, new game+, and more.
Once we leave Early Access for our full launch on Steam and XBOX, the price will raise to $19.99. It will remain there for our subsequent platform launches.
PERKS:
We really want to show our thanks to those who support us during our Early Access period.The first 500 Early Access supporters to buy the game and send us a screenshot to our Discord (join our Discord here) will receive their name in the credits as a special thanks for helping us out through development.
In addition to getting your name into the credits, participating enters you into a drawing where 5 lucky players will get a free code for Depths of Sanity’s finished release on an additional platform of their choosing. So if you win and are looking forward to the Switch version in particular, you’ll be able to get an additional Switch copy for free.
WRAPPING UP:
We’re incredibly excited to show you what we’ve been working on at the end of the month, and can’t wait for our launch.
We really hope you choose to support us through this period and are incredibly grateful for those of you who take the plunge with us.
Keep following us on Twitter for updates, join our Discord, and we’ll be in touch soon with our official launch trailer!