Devlog: THE DEEP HOWL

The Deep Howl released January 18, 2026, so it's fairly recent. Here I'm going to go into some more detail into how some things were done.

The Deep Howl is inspired by IRON LUNG by David Szymanski, NOT the movie IRON LUNG by markiplier which coincidentally came out around the same time as my game. But also inspired by some elements of the lore from Pressure, and the analog horror series Vita Carnis. I started the game almost 2 and a half years ago, in November of 2023. For the Deep Howl I didn't document much of my development process, but I have two videos on my youtube going over how some of the monsters work.

Both of these videos contain secrets going into the lore of the game. The lore is probably the most important part of the Deep Howl, with the replayability coming from the documents that you collect by exploring the sinkhole in each expedition.

The lore is basically, an insanely loud sound was heard in the Pacific ocean just off the coast of the Philippines, where the sound originiated a massive sinkhole was discovered on the sea floor. Every 6 months the loud sound returns, killing off all nearby marine life, and causing panic in South East Asia. In December of 2000, the sound was 2 months overdue, so your character is a depressed marine biologist who volunteered to dive into the sinkhole to investigate.

This is some of the earliest gameplay I have of the game where I was testing the sonar feature. Discord compression into Youtube compression makes it near impossible to see anything. The way the sonar works is that there's a folder in the workspace that has all of the objects that the player scans for, in a server script the game loops through the folder returning the offset of. THIS is the video I watched for making the sonar system. I cut a lot of the multiplayer aspects and only made it display the dot whenever the scan positions are sent to the client.

After adding the sonar I added a power system that depletes when you have your flashlight or sonar on, and also adding oxygen that depletes passively. The way it works is insanely simple, the power is a number, then I just have a loop running that subtracts from the power for the current usage amount. Flashlight on is -0.25, sonar on is -0.75, so together you get -1 if both of them are on.

With all the core gameplay most of the work afterwards was building the map, and writing documents. There was also the main menu which was like developing a second game on the side. I really like interactive main menus, because I think they're so much more fun and immersive than just a bunch of buttons and then some kinda wallpaper in the background. I don't think enough people utilize main menus as well as they could. But for the story I ended up creating a bunch of newpaper clippings for the starting cutscene, here are all of them:

The map took insanely long to make, even though a lot of the assets are reused, most of the buildings important for the lore had to be unique buildings. I was writing the lore as I was building to make sure everything lined up with the story of the sinkhole. Everything had to look detailed without ruining the simplistic artstyle, which is a lot harder than it sounds. The first buildings were made around 2 weeks into development, which were the trailer homes that the researchers on the island were using, they're also the buildings I reused the most because of how simplistic they are.