Posted August 16, 2022 by r3sgame
Welcome back! These past few weeks have been spent adding quality-of-life improvements to the game. Here's a list of them all!
First off, I've added a camera that smoothly interpolates to a set position instead of sticking to a fixed place behind the vehicle. This makes the gameplay much smoother and less obtrusive. It did take a while to smoothen out the interpolation, however. You can see how this new camera works in the video above.
Next up, we have models! My game is supposed to have a steampunk aesthetic, but the original vehicle models didn't really take advantage of this. To fix this, I researched other interpretations of what a steampunk vehicle would look like. Immediately, two things were crucial to add:
I utilized these new findings to add a gear mechanism that can be found near the top of every vehicle and large pipes on the sides. Here's the result:
This was, by far, the hardest to get right. In the current version of the game, I noticed that touching other racers would cause the player to go flying, which was not optimal for a semi-realistic game. To solve this, I would need to implement two things:
Fortunately, the Unity physics material asset makes this task slightly easier. After tinkering with the parameters, this problem is lessened. However, I still wanted to have fun with physics, so I kept a small amount of flipping if the player interferes with opponents too much.
Lastly, to give the game more oomph, I needed to introduce effects. Using Unity's S-tier particle system, I created impact effects for when a vehicle collided with an object and constant smoke for the pipes.
With these changes, Rotor Drift has more life, character, and stability. I was quite busy the past few weeks with my game jam, so I didn't really have much time to post devlogs on this project. However, I'm back to give more updates!
Now, scram.