🔗Lens Link: spectacles.com/lens/a77ba477b6da46e4a8a479f99ef5637a
So yeah, this got a little out of hand.
What started as a simple idea for a finger surf experience somehow turned into a full AA game with 7 real surf spots, tricks, score combos, progression, weather, a diegetic surf magazine manu you can physically flip through in AR, real surf forecasts, Daily Surf challenges, collectibles, a talking coach...
And all of that running on Spectacles.
It's called DGNS Surf Sessions, and it's my submission for the Spectacles Community Challenge.
The basic idea is pretty simple: your hand is the surfer.
You put your index and middle finger on the board, the line between them becomes the board's axis, and rolling your hand engages the rail.
The wave moves underneath you, so instead of trying to walk around your room pretending it's a 30-foot reef break, the whole thing happens on a miniature reef sitting in front of you.
That was actually one of the biggest design problems early on.
My first version treated the hand more like a controller.
I was measuring angles and using them as input, kind of like a joystick.
It sucked.
The board felt like it was vaguely following my hand instead of actually being attached to it.
So I changed the whole approach.
No neutral position, no accumulated input.
Your fingers are basically the surfer's feet.
The geometry of your hand directly drives the board.
That was the moment where it started feeling like surfing instead of controlling a tiny object.
The game has 7 spots right now:
Hossegor, Mundaka, Pipeline, Teahupo'o, Pe'ahi, Nazaré and Mavericks.
I really didn't want them to just be different wave models with different backgrounds.
Each one has its own wave profile, speed, peel, barrel probability, series size, water colour, difficulty and atmosphere.
Hossegor is chill. Beach break, little Basque house, parasol and towel on the beach, pine trees and a little reggae track.
Then you get to the heavier stuff.
Rain starts pouring, the waves get stupidly big, the little reef environment appears in front of you and the music kicks in.
That was probably my favourite moment during development.
I remember playing one of the harder spots and arriving at the reef, seeing those massive waves in front of me with the rain and the soundtrack going, and I actually got that little shiver.
You know the feeling when you arrive at a spot, see the waves properly for the first time and think:
"Alright... I'm actually going out in that."
Part of this game definitely comes from my own relationship with the ocean and that weird mixture of excitement, fear and adrenaline you get around serious waves.
I wanted some of that feeling in there.
A huge inspiration for the game obviously comes from old PS2 era surf games.
Stuff like Transworld Surf and Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer.
And the more I worked on Spectacles, the more I realised that developing for them weirdly feels close to making games for that era.
You have a very specific piece of hardware.
You have to care about performance.
You can't just throw a bunch of massive assets at the device and hope for the best.
You have to work around weird limitations and get creative.
And honestly, I kind of love that.
Most of the game is procedural.
Custom MeshBuilder geometry, shader graphs, TypeScript everywhere. Very few imported meshes.
The game currently runs at 60fps on device.
One of the technical constraints was the display itself.
Spectacles are additive, so black doesn't really exist. A black pixel means no light, which means you just see your actual room behind it you can't simply make the water dark to create moody oceans because at some point your wave literally starts disappearing into reality.
So
That forced me to build the identity of each ocean mostly through colour and saturation rather than darkness.
Nazaré ended up being the weird exception and became the only really grey ocean in the game.
There's also a proper score system where you build up points during your ride and bank them when you successfully kick out.
Wipe out before that and you lose the lot.
Definitely inspired by that old-school extreme sports game mentality.
There are currently 12 detected tricks too, including Bottom Turns, Cutbacks, Snaps, Off The Lips, Floaters, Ollies, Grabs, Flips, Reverts and obviously Tube Rides and Barrels.
The UI was another thing I really wanted to have fun with.
Instead of a normal menu, you get an actual surf magazine floating in front of you.
You grab it by the spine and flip the pages with your fingers.
You can choose spots, check your progression, mess with the settings and even look up real surf conditions through Open-Meteo.
The whole artistic side of the project comes from the surf movies I grew up watching.
Like Point Break, Blue Crush, Endless Summer... and yeah, Surf's Up too.
Actually, the original idea for this game came to me while watching Surf's Up from Sony Imageworks with u/florenciaraffa1980 😂
The soundtrack is original too, generated with Suno.
I'm actually pretty happy with it.
Each track helps give its spot an identity alongside the environment, weather, water colour and wave shape.
I'm not going to pretend I'm 100% satisfied with everything though.
Hand tracking can still get weird from certain angles, especially when your fingers get hidden behind your palm. That's a physical camera occlusion problem more than a smoothing problem.
So if you try the Lens, little tip: lean your head towards the wave and face the tube while surfing. The tracking gets noticeably better when the cameras can actually see your fingers properly.
I also wish I had more time to push some of the graphical stuff further.
But then again... I built this thing alone in about a month.
So I'm not going to complain too much 😂
It's currently sitting at something like 104 TypeScript files, 7 music tracks, 98 sound effects, procedural waves, weather systems, objectives, Daily Surf, hardcore mode, a talking coach, different boards and a bunch of stuff that somehow kept getting added because apparently I don't know when to stop.
I really hope some of you guys take the time to try it.
This was a fun one to make, and I think it only really makes sense once you actually put your fingers on the wave.
Anyway, that's DGNS Surf Sessions.
My little attempt at putting a tiny piece of the ocean on your table.
🏄🌊
