Hello again, Washers! 👋
We’re back with a new DevLog, and today we’re looking at a recently revealed feature, Abseiling!
If you haven’t seen our latest gameplay trailer yet, you can check it out here ⬇️
This time we have PowerWash Simulator 2 Programmer, Jordan telling us a little about his role in the design of the abseiling feature.
Jordan starts by saying; “Abseiling was the first big mechanic I got to work on when I moved from PowerWash Simulator to PowerWash Simulator 2. It was very daunting to be given one of the big new features to implement, but it was mostly exciting!
Abseiling might seem simple at first, but there are lots of things to consider when working on something like this. Maths, tooling for design and game feel are the most important. I’ll try to cover some of these in a way that makes it sound interesting.” It is interesting, Jordan!
“The maths that was involved was largely translating the movement of the player from the XZ plane to XY. This means taking the player’s movement from the horizontal (forward, back, left and right) relative to the world, to the vertical plane (up, down, left and right) relative to the abseiling surface.
In addition to this, we also need to keep track of the player’s position on the wall so that we can have them dismount at the top and the bottom correctly.”
Jordan continues; “We also need to project the position of the player onto the crossbar that the rope attaches to. We have to calculate the end points of the crossbar and project the position onto that, including a small “look ahead vector” that makes it look as though the player is being pulled by the motor.”
“A large part of development that largely goes under the radar is custom tooling. We needed to make sure that the abseiling setup was as seamless as possible for our designers, so that they can just drag the abseiling equipment into a level, define a few parameters and have it just work.”
“I made a set up tool for this, which allows the designers to define things like; equipment width, rope length, distance from the wall. These are all controlled by sliders, with the addition of a few buttons to allow us to automate certain parts in levels that need less fine-tuning.
These are by no means the only things, but I don’t want to give too much away. I went back and forth with our designers to make sure that this was as simple as it could be.”
We can’t wait for you to all have fun with the abseiling equipment! We’re really proud of how well this has turned out, as well as the scissor lift, which we also had a look at in the gameplay trailer!
These both bring fresh ways to clean the filth at height, letting you make smaller adjustments to the level you’re hosing down and have some fun while you’re at it.
Did you see something in the gameplay trailer you’d like us to take a deeper look into, or something you’d like the team to talk about? Drop your ideas down in the comments for us!
To keep up with all PowerWash Sim 2 news, you can wishlist it here ⬇️
We’ll catch you in the next one, Washers 💦
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