It’s been a while since I’ve last posted here. A lot has been going on. PlayStation Experience will be my last showing in quite some time. I’m back to prototyping and working on tech/design problems of the game.

Water

I went back to working and refining the water mechanic. On the surface level, it doesn’t look any different from what I had before, but the code is much cleaner. Previously, the code was full of nested if/else statements that made it incredibly difficult to read and debug, especially as there were all these different cases to account for.

I finally sat down and really organized the code, moving a lot of things to separate functions which could then be called and reused regularly.

The water mechanic is now working quite well. It uses an object pool, so each “water block” is recycled (disabled and enabled again), instead of being instantiated during run time.

The boxes are basically the trigger areas. I made them visible for the purpose of debugging. There were a bunch of issues when I was using them at a larger size (1x1x1), so I made them smaller, and that fixed many of the issues.

So now, the water responds dynamically when player places a “redirection cube” in front of the stream (or removes it), and also responds when the ground beneath it moves away, or moves back into place.

Having played around with the mechanic a little more, I think it won’t actually be quite what I had originally imagined. I don’t think I will give player total freedom to redirect water streams with the “redirection cubes”. It’s just too unpredictable, causes too many design problems, and I don’t think it actually adds that much to the game.

Instead, what I’m going to do is limit the places where water can redirected, such as by having these stations in which player can change the direction of the water.

Game Design

Recently, it has been dawning on me just how massive this project is. This was especially evident as I was writing the code for water, and realizing all the possibility spaces this mechanic brings up, and all the design challenges that come with it.

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of the game’s world structure. I will sit down and write about this some more in detail next week when I’m home for the holidays and have some free time.

That being said, I think I’ve been making design decisions out of fear of negative reviews. I keep trying to make sure that the player is not lost, and can figure things out, and that moments of confusion are to be avoided at all cost. I’m starting to think I should not adhere to that philosophy so closely. Again, more about this in another post.

House of Stairs

Going to start playing with crazy architecture some more.

Here’s a space I’m trying to make which is just made of staircases everywhere.

I love the visuals, the it’s really pushing the performance of Unity to the limit. I need to figure out a way to optimize both the creation process as well as when it’s running in game.

Regarding the last two images, the player isn’t actually supposed to see that. There’s a bug which causes you to fall out of the game world. I love the look of it though. Might be interesting to see if this can worked into the game somehow.