Week one of Parasite was about putting in place our core systems—movement, enemy AI, sound. This week was more design focused, with our designer working on various iterations of the prototype level. These are already proving quite fun, and the designs have clarified some of the issues that fuelled my concerns about the physics-driven movement. Or rather, the prototype level has clarified by understanding of the game’s design. Parasite is about swinging and flowing through environments that are tailor made to the tentacle mechanic; it’s less a Carrion-style reverse horror game than it is a physics puzzle box. It helps to know what you’re making!
I posted a picture last week of the active ragdoll walking for the player. It was actually this week that I worked on that, so I shall post it again here:
Look at him go! This was a fun little thing to work on, and not overly technical. It was a bit of a fuss getting it working with an upper leg, knee, and lower leg for each leg. I suspect I’ll have to spend a lot more time figuring out how to animate each section to help keep the poor fellow upright. Putting angular constraints on the hinge joints in the legs doesn’t seem to do much. The effect is surprisingly cool though. The floppy, crab-like movement really does sell that impression of a corpse being animated by this most hideous host.
The other programmer on the project, Fred, has been spending a lot of time with the tentacle. We’re trying to really give it weight and presence, and so to that end we’ve implemented it as a projectile with customisable speed.
It’s hard to tell from this GIF, and still not really obvious during gameplay, but the tentacle does extend outwards. Later, during final production, we’re probably going to dig deeper into the subtleties of this physical interaction. There might need to be some sort of inverse kinematics involved to send an impulse back along the tentacle when it hits a surface, just to give it a bit of wobble. But at the same time, we want this to be relatively fast. The player can’t be standing around waiting while the damn thing flies over to a surface and sticks there. So, as always, there will have to be compromise.
Parasite is proving an enjoyable contrast to Magical Spell Masters. Relying so heavily on Unity’s built-in physics, there’s been less of an onus on us programmers to get the prototype up and running. We built a bit of AI, ironed out some bugs in the movement code, rigged up some level loading, got some compound bounding boxes working for grounded checks and player state awareness… But that’s about it so far. MSM has been significantly more demanding, not least of all because I’m the only programmer working on it. That game is mechanically more complex than this, and I’m grappling with event systems, complex UI animations, and just a lot of stuff in general. However, as we move into final production and focus more on the little details, Parasite will require us to dive deeper into the physics, and that’s sure to be challenging.
I’ll finish this with a rather large (be patient!) GIF of the background layers. We’re not currently using parallax scrolling or anything. But I’m really liking the way our artists are using colour to convey depth. This space is feeling appropriately cavernous:
I can’t wait to get some proper sound design and music in here.