Obstacles, Falling & Resetting ~ 36 hours

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.

Comments

Let's Get Physical ~ 58 hours

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...

Movement Basics ~ 6 hours

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.

Falling Done Right ~ 162 hours

Before, when a stack of three would hang over the edge and then fall, the stack would rotate from the cube that is farthest in the direction of motion, as it would on solid ground. Now, the stack figures out which cube is the farthest toward the direction of motion which is still on solid ground , and rotates from there instead. Also shown: a stack of three can walk width-wise along a path of 1, as long as it is balanced. Also shown: when the stack presses a button and then rolls off the edge, the button needs to stay in the same pressed state while the stack resets itself. Otherwise, falling back in would count as another button hit and change the state of the game! That's cheating. The way it was before.

Temple Block

Search This Blog