Temple Block

Well hey! I actually made a level that actually takes some actual thought to solve. The first of 20 or so I'll do for the Alpha release.

I set up a system that links a utility tile to another. A "trigger - target" relationship, and many different modes and attributes that define it... all modifiable in the "Maker" portion of the project. There has been a lot of work done behind the scenes on the "Maker," which is why it has been a lot of hours between posts. As you can see if you're paying attention to titles and dates, I put in as many hours over the past ten days as I had before, since starting in March. That's unemployment for ya! Here you can see pressing on that button opens a hole in the floor, allowing you to slip down it and win! Yay!

Fresh from off a camping vacation to Oregon, I decided the stack should turn physical (as opposed to animated) when it falls off the map. All the different ways it could possibly fall would be too time-consuming to animate by hand. So! As soon as the player presses the button, the stack already knows if it is going to fall or not. All that was necessary was to stick a rigidBody on the collider, enable it, and add some torque at the right moment. There is still a hitch at the moment it switches from kinematic to physical though, no matter how much I play around with physics materials, torques, masses and gravity. Maybe someday I'll make the stack's regular motion physics-based too, just to get rid of that hitch. Looks okay here though...

The stack can now run into stuff like walls and other cubes. And it will fall off the edge, finally. I had the hardest time getting the stack to reset into its old position after falling. I puzzled over it for four nights. The hierarchy is getting complicated, so that means a lot of positions and rotations I have to capture in order to put the whole stack back where it was.

The starting cube can now attach others to itself and the way it moves will change. It doesn't know about the tiles on the ground yet though (no falling)! Also shown: some basic art design for the cubes. I'm going with some kind of nite-brite tiki-totem aesthetic.

The cube moves around by rotating forward on its leading edge. At the moment an arrow key is pressed, the cube de-parents itself from its "holder" while the holder orients to the new tile which the cube will occupy. Then the cube re-parents itself and a local animation is played of the holder rotating 90 degrees at its corner (and bouncing a little). The player may queue up a string of moves by pressing the keys really fast. The cube waits until the animation is far enough along before going on to the next move, but tries to get through the queue faster by speeding up the animation, as you can see.