Adding Fall Damage and Atmospheric Effects

Minor update: The past week I spend a lot of time making a number of refinements to the game world.

• Fall damage will now be in the game. Movement speed of the player character (PC) when hitting a surface determines how bad the damage is:
  • < 20 m/s, the PC will land safely.
  • At 28 m/s, the PC will stumble but can still move.
  • At 36 m/s the PC collapses into a heap for a second or so.
  • >45 m/s the PC will die. (Terminal velocity is 60 m/s).

  Of course there are huge liberties taken with physics for playability. The PC has to hit a surface at 98 mph in order to die! Even though this is generous, it still only takes three seconds of falling to die (a distance of ~60 meters). To do: I’ll also make this damage cumulative. PCs will die if they receive a good deal of damage over a few seconds.

• Fall effects were added. The camera will change its field of view when the PC moves at high speeds. The FOV is corrected as the PC slows down. There is also a special wind sound effect that gets louder as the PC’s speed increases.
• I added dust special effects to the moving bricks as they come out of the wall. To do: add these effects between extended bricks that are moving.
• I changed the side textures to mitigate some of the stretching. It is still noticeable, and I will eventually have to split the textures between high and low res.
• Optimized some of the audio scripts and fixed a a few glaring bugs.

My next step is to create two new brick types: inverted and auto-extended. Inverted bricks go into the wall rather than out. They are rather difficult to pull off, since they require special treatment with regards to the procedural generation script and they modify the bricks that surround them. It’s complicated. Auto-extended are the opposite of the auto-retracting gold bricks, they always pull themselves out when pushed in, forming barriers that the player will need to dig past.

Also, I am visiting family in Texas tomorrow. I’ll be working via laptop during this time, but I do not expect to get a lot done until this Sunday. I will need to release a testing version of the game to my beta testers in a week or so, to test the falling mechanics and brick types. That’s it for now.