Fathom

I wanted to build a classic arcade shooter. Then I fell down a Wikipedia hole about the hadal zone. That's the deepest part of the ocean. Below 6,000 meters. No light. Crushing pressure. Creatures that glow in the dark to find their prey. I looked at the glowing rows of descending aliens on my screen and thought: those aren't aliens. Those are anglerfish. The whole game changed in a night.

You pilot a bathysphere at the bottom of the screen. Above you, formations of bioluminescent creatures descend. Anglerfish with glowing lures. Vampire squid with webbed tentacles. Jellyfish trailing tendrils. They don't march in straight lines. Ocean currents push your shots sideways. Whirlpools form and pull everything toward them. A gulper eel the size of the screen shows up every five fathoms. I call it the Leviathan. It has a health bar and a bad attitude.

Here's the weird part. When you die the first time, you don't lose a life. You possess one of the creatures. For eight seconds, you're inside the swarm, firing from the other side. It's disorienting and beautiful and I spent a week getting it right. There's also an echo system. A ghost of yourself follows you, firing where you were 1.4 seconds ago. So you're always fighting alongside your own past. I guess you could say the game has... depth.

No images. No audio files. Every anglerfish, every jellyfish tendril, every whirlpool spiral is drawn with math. The sounds are synthesized. The ambient music is a deep-sea drone in D minor. The whole thing runs on a 640 by 480 canvas. I wanted it to feel like looking through a bathysphere porthole. The CRT scanlines and vignette are there for that reason. It's dark down here. But the things that glow are worth finding.