The Orca Breached
The Orca Breached is a serious game that puts players inside the body of the ocean's most intelligent predator, orca. Players navigate using echolocation, hunt using documented whale strategies, and survive a catastrophic stranding.
This game is designed to bridge the gap between human and wildlife, transforming raw gameplay into a powerful call for environmental consciousness.
Role: Game Designer
Team Size: 4
Timeline: 1 Month
Genre: Serious Game
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC
Research-Driven Design
Research Areas
Acoustic Perception
How whales construct spatial awareness through sound, not sight.
Hunting Culture
The 'Wave Wash': A Type B Orca strategy to knock seals off ice floes.
The Challenge
Translating scientific accuracy into compelling gameplay without feeling like a lecture.
Core Game Loop
Stranding Physics
The physiological effect of gravity on the whale's breathing and mobility.
Core Mechanic: Echolocation
The underwater world is in darkness by default. To navigate, players emit sonar pulses that ripple outward from the orca. These ripples provide instant feedback: Green pulses reveal prey ahead, while Red pulses indicate clear water or obstacles.
Design Intent: This forces players to actively scan their environment, simulating the constant auditory processing real whales perform.
Core Mechanic: Wave Wash Hunting
Inspired from the Wave Wash — a documented hunting technique where Type B Orcas generate waves to knock seals off ice floes. Players firstly find the seal on the ice floe, then pass the QTE (Quick-Time Event) to generate the wave and catch the prey.
Design Intent: It turns hunting into a skill-based rhythm sequence, emphasizing that orcas use intelligence and physics, not just size and teeth.
Core Mechanic: The Wiggle System
When a hurricane hits, the orca beaches — separated from their pod and stranded on sand, and free movement disappears. The player must wait for procedurally generated waves. When waves are going out, players press wiggle button to thrash and slide toward the ocean. Missing the wave window will lose stamina.
Design Intent: To make the player feel heavy and helpless, contrasting with their agility in the earlier water sections.
System Design: The Living Ocean
To add replayability and depth, I designed a background system that adjusts difficulty based on environmental parameters.
Design Intent: To make the player feel heavy and helpless, contrasting with their agility in the earlier water sections.
What Players Take Away
At the end of The Orca Breached, the player has lived a short life as a marine mammal.
Cognitive Empathy: After navigating the deep solely through sound and physically struggling against gravity on the shore, players step out of their human perspective and internalize the sensory reality and physical hardships of the species.
Ecological Awareness: Players learn through failure that human-generated noise is a blinding fog that cripples their senses. Also, the climate instability sometimes turn an apex predator into a vulnerable victim.
By grounding every mechanic in biological reality, we created a survival experience that is as educational as it is fun to play. It's a testament to the power of design to turn data into empathy.
Next Step
If I were to continue development, I would expand the whale "Pod" mechanic, allowing the player to issue commands to AI orcas to solve more complex environmental puzzles.
