Nice one!  That was a fast patch!
This should make S.E.A available to many more people.
Any chance you could enable donations on the itch page?

Gotcha, will do.

I know this will probably go a bit off topic but it does have something todo with this game and all your other awesome games.
@shiftbacktick
Have you ever conciddered putting a recording feature in your games?
The reason I ask is that these games to me litteraly produce ambient music and it would be really cool if one could record themselves playing right from within the games so they could listen to it while on the go.
Yeah I know that you could probably set up some other program on your computer to record it but I just thought it would be a nice little miscelainious feature to have in there and I read on your website that you have a degree in computermusic so this probably would be familiar to you right?

Hmm, I wonder how much control you will ultimately have over what gets offloaded to the GPU, seeing as how it's HTML. How does the game even run, like did you have to make your own sort of browser? In either case, I wonder if you could set up hardware acceleration on it. That might help even if folks do want the graphics, since the realtime synthesis expects much from the CPU to begin with, then you add drawing the graphics on top of that.

I wish I had a good way of mapping what it does to my CPU. Oh sure, I can take a sample before and after the game starts, but I want an average reading and I know that windows has a graphing function inside task manager, but it's not accessible. I could use Charm, but since it's sound based, it would kind of defeat the purpose of playing the game to begin with since it's producing its own sounds to give you a realtime idea of what your CPU, disk I/O and RAM are doing.

I like that. If you line it up well, that should be represented equally as if you don't, so things off to the side would still be off to the side as in a real photo.

I wonder if we could have coral as well. Something that would slow you down if you entered it, giving a sort of interesting sound, but would have it's own ambient sounds as you just listened to them rather than trying to run through them.

Many replies below.

@33:

Haha, I wish I could build my own browser! The desktop build of the game is packaged with Electron, which some folks have affectionately called Flash for the desktop. It's a wrapper for Chromium and can serve web apps as if they're standalone desktop applications, so you get access to all the same Web APIs (like the HTML canvas) and generally only need one codebase for a cross-platform app. Personally I like it, but wish its file size were smaller.

I'm still very new to drawing with the Canvas API so I'm studying things like this article on MDN about optimizing canvas. There are some opportunities here for GPU optimization like using multiple canvases as layers above one another so the GPU composites them for you. I made some performance gains in the last few updates, but this might be good to try next.

@34:

I love the idea of a photography mode! It could work similar to the bookmarks in soundStrider. I do wonder how it would control. Can we look or move around? is it frozen in time? I added it to my wishlist in the roadmap as a possibility.

@35, spoiler alert:

Coral and things like kelp forests would be interesting additions, but they need shallower water than the world generator currently supports, and I may want to save the shallows for another project. I do want to add underwater biomes that give more variety to the soundscapes you explore. I'm thinking different musical textures, rhythms, and motifs that play along with the more persistent drones. Perhaps special areas too?

@36:

Thanks for the report, no need for logs. This is a known issue and one that's proving very difficult to fix. Sometimes when a "certain sound" starts, a filter it's connected to gets into a bad state, which breaks everything else it's connected to, including the main output. Right now I'm using an analyzer to detect when the audio crashes this way and then rebuild whatever I think causes it. The fix isn't quite working right now (it causes an infinite loop of crashing and restarting) but I think I'm on the right track.

@37 I hope that in the place of markers, they are stopped in time. Because it happened to me once when with a friend we were playing "el caminador" and we found an arpeggiator that played an incredible melody, and we saved it in a marker. when we loaded the marker, the original melody had disappeared
When you have the animals ready, you could add animals such as sharks, octopuses or (other types of things according to the roadmap) that cannot kill you but that do give you some sound and visual effect apart from hitting the submarine and making it more difficult to escape from them

I literally fell sleep playing this today lol. When I woke up, there was a treasure near me which I don't remember so either I was playing it in my sleep or I nodded off right after a scan.

A few things. I wonder if we could have waves that have motion and volume. You do hear waves if you sit there idle and just listen, but for my purposes, I want to use them to launch off of . When I'm near the surface, I always get a few jumps in, but I think it would be fun to be able to get airborne using waves if you were heading into one.

I wonder if it would be useful to put a cooldown on turbo mode? I wouldn't want to have to be forced to go the distance without it, but at the same time, it does make gathering treasures easier. Especially since the most trouble I have is lining up vertically. I can use the doppler effect to help which you don't really get a whole lot without turbo on, so it definitely makes things easier. Plus, if you're using a controller, you can just run in turbo all the time because you can modulate your speed with the analog inputs.

Cool, I was giving this a try earlier this week with view to creating a db page, accept that I seemed to get lost in a maze of walls, and couldn't find anything specific. I liked the directional sonar sounds when you turned, but While the continuous tones were nice to listen to, and I liked the change between surface and deeper sea, I was a little sad I couldn't find any treasures or major changes in the environment to keep me looking around, so the idea of acquatic ambience sounds nice, especially for helping you realise where you have and haven't been.

Are all of the caverns interconnected? or do you sometimes need to just head back up to the surface, travel a bit and go down? and is there an optimum place to dive, or is the idea to just hunt around and see what you find.

Again, I have no problem exploring the environment if I feel my exploration is getting somewhere, it was the fact that I felt a bit boxed in which was mildly problematic.

@Fubsepude:

Great question. I love itch and will continue to support it for all my games. I plan to use Steam as another distribution method. For the festival I hope to collect feedback so I can prioritize things in the roadmap and understand where to go with pricing.

@Dark:

Thanks for the feedback about the caves. I'm sorry that you felt boxed in and I understand why. I can tell you more about how the world is generated. There's an ocean floor with various features like hills and trenches carved into it. Anything below it can be carved out by different sorts of structures that form a sort of swiss cheese of pockets and elongated tubes. They don't have reason or always connect. Sometimes you do need to back out and find a new cave.

When I originally built this it was purely theoretical and I had to trust my intuition of the math. Now that I have better tools to visualize the structures they form, there could be some opportunities for adjustments. Should I make any changes to terrain in this way, then I will need to implement it in a way that doesn't break saves.

One thing I could add without breaking saves is tunnel generation. Occasionally the terrain generator might spawn a worm, which digs a winding path through the terrain. These tunnels would connect the floor to different holes in the swiss cheese. They'd be much easier to follow. Possibly they'd have different sounds or guaranteed treasure. I've added this to my roadmap for the next big update.

WOOT Woot!  I'm happy for the update, I think the 1 through 0 idea is a good one for those with keyboard issues, plus it should help with those using switch controls.
Take all the time you need to figure it out.  You can't rush art and expect an ideal result, and IMO your games really blur the line between.

When you add sea animals?