I made a little online multiplayer game inspired by my recent underwater robotics work. You can pilot a little ROV around the ocean, explore shipwrecks, take photos and categorize fish and things. It’s multiplayer and I’m thinking of having treasure hunts, etc. I put the basic version up at https://bloop.quest/.
I am hoping to expand the game and keep developing it, so would love any ideas or feedback anyone has.
Hi @keenan, love to see it - thanks for sharing!! 
I have plenty of ideas around underwater-related dynamics that would be useful in a “learning to use an ROV” context, but I’m unsure how many of them would meaningfully contribute to the fun in a game (e.g. tether snags, and losing visibility when you stir up silt near the ground can be realistic, but could also be quite frustrating).
That said, some dynamics are rather fun to program, regardless of whether they contribute to the fun in a game 
As an example, @williangalvani and I definitely enjoyed implementing a version of boids in the BlueSim-based demo[1] of BlueOS+Cockpit, so the “fish” tend to swim together when they’re close to each other:
I suspect environment variation could make for interesting scenarios. The things you’d expect to happen in a cave, tunnel, or pipe, may be different than those in open water, or near a coral reef, or in sea grass.
I suspect this would be made more exciting if the ships had colliders, so you have areas to navigate into that can’t just be reached by floating through the wall
“Things to do” is likely a more enticing draw for some people than unguided exploration (though of course others may prefer the latter). It may be interesting to add a manipulator that can pick things up and take them to places (e.g. to retrieve lost items, perform a rescue, or clean up rubbish), and/or apply cleaning techniques (brushing, cavitation, etc) and take sensor measurements as part of an infrastructure or aquaculture inspection or scientific mission or investigation.
Some people are also into resource management (e.g. battery, “purchasing” the right equipment for upcoming missions, etc), but for others those restrictions can ruin the fun / make it feel like work - not sure what kind of vision you’re most keen to pursue.
Takes ~5 minutes to start up ↩︎
Thanks for the thoughtful response @EliotBR !
I love your demo of boids. Yes I’ve thought a lot about the tension between realism and fun for what I hope is a largely fun and educational tool, though I"m interested in everyone else’s opinion. For this game I think my priorities are something like:
So if I can make something more realistic without compromising on fun, I would like to do so, but I realize there will likely be many cases where those things are at odds.
All great ideas as well for things to do. I would definitely like to add an arm of some kind to pick up things like ghost fishing pots etc which is a nice educational and fun combo I think.
Resource management is interesting. I’ll need to think on the best way to implement that in a fun way.
