The Descent

Dive deep, grab salvage, and push past safe crush depth in The Descent. Balance your oxygen return cost and surface before pressure grinds your hull to zero.

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The Descent

Inspiration

Deep-sea salvage is the ultimate push-your-luck bet. I wanted to capture the white-knuckle tension of deep exploration in a mobile portrait format, boiling the survival experience down to one critical question under your thumb: "Do I dive one meter deeper, or surface now?"

What it does

The Descent is a fixed-portrait survival and resource management game where players pilot a salvage sub down a 340m trench:

  • The Return-Cost Meter: Oxygen is split live between usable dive air and shaded air reserved strictly for the climb home.
  • Crush Depth as a Greed Dial: Sinking below your rated hull depth is never blocked—it just steadily grinds your hull away for richer loot.
  • Cargo Mass & Jettison: Heavy salvage slows your ascent. Players can slap Jettison to dump high-value cargo and gain the speed needed to outrun suffocation.
  • Surface Economy: Bank salvage to repair damage and buy 4 focused upgrades (Tanks, Hull, Lamp, Thrusters) to reach the ocean floor and raise the ancient Beacon.

How we built it

  • Three.js & Canvas: Orthographic camera for geometric clarity, procedural radial glow shaders, and particle emitters.
  • Procedural Web Audio: 100% synthesized sound effects (depth drone, sonar pings, diegetic hull groans, heartbeat) with zero external audio files.
  • Zero-Dependency Tooling: Custom Node bundler (tools/build.mjs) emitting a single, unminified index.html with vendored libraries, resulting in a tiny 0.44 MB self-contained offline build.

Challenges we ran into

  • The Lying Gauge: Early climb math diverged from actual ascent speed. I derived the return cost in closed form (base/v)(d + d²/2K) with turnaround buffers to guarantee mathematical honesty.
  • Touch Ergonomics: Lower-screen thumb placement initially forced accidental dives. Offsetting the sub 12m above the touch point turned the thumb into a trailing handle with a balanced neutral hold band.
  • The Ascent Trap: Recycling off-screen salvage made the climb feel empty. Persisting all skipped salvage turned the ascent into a strategic second-pass harvest weighed against cargo drag.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The Beacon Climax: On the final descent, players must purge hundreds of hard-won salvage units into the dark abyss just to make the sub light enough to surface with the Beacon.
  • Sub-Megabyte Footprint: Packaging a complete 3D game with dynamic audio and deep survival mechanics into under 500 KB without external CDN calls.
  • Focused Design: High replayability driven by three distinct hazard behaviors and transparent systems rather than mechanical sprawl.

What we learned

  • Honest Telemetry Drives Fear: When players trust the dashboard, tension stems from their own calculated greed rather than arbitrary penalties.
  • Simulate Before Guessing: Running Monte Carlo balance simulations over hundreds of runs exposed systemic flaws far faster than manual playtesting.

What's next for The Descent

  • Abyssal Biomes: Geothermal updrafts, shifting trench currents, and magnetic storm hazards.
  • Sub Archetypes: Specialized chassis (e.g., Heavy Dredger vs. Agile Scout Rig).
  • Seeded Daily Expeditions: Global daily trench depths and leaderboards for competitive salvage runs.

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