We're not sure when, or even if, DayZ creator Dean Hall is sleeping. His New Zealand-based game studio, RocketWerkz, has not only been updating its survival game Icarus (opens in new tab) weekly for 68 weeks straight, but has also been working on the space station management game Stationeers (opens in new tab) and the upcoming transportation Tycoon game Art of the Rail (open in new tab).

Hall himself is also still an active modder, creating popular mods for games like Project Zomboid and the two-man submarine for Barotrauma (opens in new tab). And he's always excited to talk about the other games he plays, from Space Station 13 to the open-world survival game Eco to the Frostpunk board game.

"It's a good thing that I'm not a fan of the new stuff he's working on, because when I spoke with Hall at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, he immediately opened up his laptop and showed me some of the new stuff he's working on," he said.

It's called Torpedia, a submarine colony management game. 'Basically, Torpedia is a rimworld,' he said. 'You build a submarine, and in Torpedia you manage the health (both physical and mental) of the crew and send the submarine on missions in dangerous waters. Gather resources and loot from shipwrecks and flotsam, build and customize your submarine, and grow it from a rickety, leaky wooden submersible into a high-tech, multi-layered steel vessel. [I'm playing a build of "Torpedia" this week, and for a game so early in development that it doesn't even have a Steam page yet, it's surprisingly easy to play. The tutorial teaches the basics, such as fueling a word-burning generator to recharge the ship's batteries, piloting a submarine to empty ballast in an emergency, letting the crew swim out of an airlock to salvage a wreck, hunting fish for food, and managing basic repairs. They will teach you the basics. Then I visit ports to trade resources with traders, take on assignments, hire new crew members (one of whom is half man, half shark, and has become my favorite), and head out to sea on my own.

I kill my crew more or less instantly. While in port, I put a hatch on the creaky wooden submarine, intending to soon turn it into a two-story structure. Unfortunately, I forgot to wire the hatch to the ship's generator, and soon the submarine was flooded with sea water, sinking like a stone and drowning my crew.

In another session, we were chugging along on the surface of the ocean so that we could power the submarine with electricity from burning wood (we had to rely on batteries while diving) when we were warned of an approaching ice storm. The temperature dropped and the crew thought it would be uncomfortable, but instead the surface of the water froze over and the submarine was pinned in ice. By the time the ice melted, the generator ran out of power and the submarine sank again. Lesson learned: dive when the water is cold enough to freeze.

In Torpedia, he experiences an even more barotraumatic and horrific death (open in new tab). While out gathering seaweed, my submarine slowly drifted over my scuba diver, pinning him to the ocean floor. He died. Sent a diver to collect wood from a sunken ship, he was attacked by piranhas. Dead. Then my wooden submarine hit the seabed and flooded again, rupturing the hull and my little guy drowned before he could salvage the boat. But I am sure I will eventually live long enough to see how the personalities of my crew (they can have attributes such as greed, empathy, and psychopathy) clash with or agree with each other, learning something with each death.

I also hope to complete enough missions to find enough loot to build a large submarine or buy one in port. The submarine building menu shows advanced machinery such as uranium fuel reactors, jet engines, escape pods, radar stations, torpedo racks, etc. A mini-sub-dock could be attached to the mobile base. A "small submarine inside a big submarine" sounds a lot like "Chasing Red October!" Sounds like.

As for how Torpedo came into being in the first place, Hall told us that his work on "Stationers" was the catalyst. I wanted to do a better simulation of water, but I just couldn't do it," he said. My math isn't very good, and I couldn't understand it in 3D, so I made a 2D water simulation. So I built a 2D water simulation. And here we are."

I nodded knowingly, as if to say, "Well, of course, when you want to come up with a water simulation for a certain game, you create a whole new game."

Again, there is no word on when "Torpedia" will be available for play, and I can't point you to any links other than the official RocketWerkz site (opens in a new tab). I've really liked what I've played so far, so I hope others won't have to wait too long to play it: I don't want to be the only one who dies a terrible death at the bottom of the ocean.