Preparing a route
Moving through a cave involves preparing a route. Vertical pitches require ropes, anchors, and climbing equipment. Flooded passages call for scuba gear. Shovels and winches help clear blocked passages. In co-op, players coordinate rope rigging and search for routes deeper into the cave. Tight restrictions, large chambers, and submerged sections each change what the journey demands.Kit before the expedition
Equipment preparation happens before an expedition. Players upgrade and customize their kit, including helmets, headlamps, and ropes, and choose clothing suited to different temperatures. Progression is connected to those practical obstacles. Diving equipment lets you tackle flooded routes, while climbing and digging equipment address different barriers. We are building the game around those uses of equipment, and the features are still evolving during development.Scans you can blend
Our first prototype used photogrammetry scans directly as scenery. The workflow later changed to converting scans into 3D textures that we can blend in the engine. Fredrik built a capture rig with a ring flash to reduce the harsh shadows that cave photography produces. We have gathered textures in Sweden, Norway, and Romania. Binaural recordings capture water and the sounds of equipment, including ropes, carabiners, and descenders.Canvas Level of Detail
Getting that detail into the game is only part of the problem. Making it practical on older hardware has been a major part of our graphics work. Our rendering system, Canvas Level of Detail (CLOD), starts with a low-resolution mesh and adds surface detail as the camera approaches. That lets us reuse and combine detail across the caves. An early CLOD implementation chose texture detail on the CPU using each surface patch's distance from the camera. We replaced that distance estimate with a low-resolution rendering pass that records patch IDs and the level of detail required by the current view. Whole patches still shared one resolution, so quads outside the view were being refined too. We reworked the feedback, culling, and patch rendering on the GPU so individual quads could refine independently. Only visible quads requested texture space. The improvement came from reducing unnecessary work while keeping detail where it was needed. Our development video shows that sequence of changes. Supporting older hardware remains an ongoing target.Check where the detail is being spent
The lesson for other developers is to check where detail is being spent. Removing work on unseen surfaces can preserve the detail players actually encounter.Where it stands
Cave Expedition is still in development, with its release date to be announced. You can wishlist it on Steam and follow our progress through the gameplay and development videos below.Wishlist Cave Expedition
- Cave Expedition on Steam (opens in a new tab)
- Gameplay (opens in a new tab)
- CLOD breakdown (opens in a new tab)
- Moonmilk Games (opens in a new tab)
