Andreas Kröpelin


You find Snake too boring? You like to challenge your sense of orientation? Then look no further! This is a little game where you navigate a submarine using a so-called Bearing Rate Diagram. This Smarter every day video explains how it works and how it is applied in a real submarine. It has also been the inspiration for this game, so make sure to watch that video!

The game consists of your submarine, targets (blue), and enemies (red). Your goal is to catch the targets and to avoid the enemies. All you see is the Bearing Rate Diagram which plots the bearing to each object (horizontal axis) over time (vertical axis). The bearing is just the angle between the line that describes your current course and the line connecting the object with your submarine. So, a bearing of 0° means the object is ahead of you, 90° means it's to your right, -90° means it's to your left, 180° and -180° mean it's behind you, and everything in between.

You can control your submarine by commanding a new heading and by de-/accelerating. When you command a new heading using the top slider, the submarine will slowly turn towards that. The bottom slider shows where you are actually heading to at the moment. You start with a speed of 150 %, where the speed of all other objects is 100 %.

Non-player objects move randomly with a constant speed. When one moves to far away from your submarine or collides with it, it is removed from the game. Another object of the same kind is then randomly inserted at a distant position.

If you find yourself to be a novice captain and have difficulties navigating, you can always ask for air support! This will provide you with a bird's eye view of the scene, where your submarine is a black triangle in the center, the targets are blue, and the enemies red triangles. The altitude of such an isosceles triangle represents the object's speed and its direction shows where the object is headed to.

That's all the advice I can give. Just start playing and build an intuition (using air support) on how to read the Bearing Rate Diagram. Have fun!


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heading: 0 deg
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