The following is our latest blog, originally posted on March 24th, 2016. To see our weekly updates first, register your account at the official Worlds Adrift website.
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Hello travellers! It’s Matkins here once again to give you my third update into how the creatures of Worlds Adrift are coming along.
For some time now creatures have been living out their lives in their simulated world. Wandering, feeding, breeding, migrating, and often just lazily lying around too. So our focus has shifted towards the interaction between players and creatures. More specifically we have been working on making the creatures a formidable threat to players, and their ships.
The beetles are mostly passive towards players but they are supposed to defend their habitat. So any player cutting down trees may find that any nearby beetles will try to avenge their deceased woody friends with an onslaught of head-first ram attacks.
The manta rays, on the other hand, need no excuse to attack players because they are gits. But they are especially enraged by the sound of nearby ship engines. They will chase such ships, latch on and break them apart piece by piece.
We decided that it should be “sound” that triggers these aggressive behaviours so that they only depend on being within range and not necessarily having line-of-sight. The sound analogy also leads to interesting dynamics that affect gameplay. For example, you can potentially avoid a fight with a flock of manta rays if you turn your engines down and just coast along until they’re gone.
Its great to have the attack behaviour working in the game now. It was a tricky thing to get right and no doubt will be refined further as development continues. I should remind you that the movement of the creatures is entirely controlled by physical forces. This is really important to make the creatures a believable and cohesive part of the world. But it creates challenges in achieving the desired aesthetic whilst also enabling the creatures to achieve their goals.
Here is the attack routine I came up with for attacking players. It’s just a few simple steps:
1. Close in on the target until within striking range.
2. Accelerate to a high velocity towards the target until it has been hit.
3. Retreat away from the target until outside of striking range.
4. Repeat from step 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of2g4UIpUpc
The results of this looked good, until we tested it on moving targets, ie. real players. It was just too easy to dodge a creature attack because the creatures couldn’t change direction anywhere near as quickly as a player. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly the movement of the player’s character is designed largely for player satisfaction rather than for realism. This is something we gamers have become very accustomed to. In games we will stand for nothing less than being able to sprint faster than Usain Bolt, indefinitely, and to be able to change direction near instantly as if our character’s body weighed about the same as a squirrel.
The second reason why players could (and should) dodge so easily is that they have feet on solid ground, whereas these creatures just have wings in air. I’m talking about traction. If a bird tried to fly into you at high speed, providing you were on your feet and saw it coming with enough time to react, you would be able to dodge it by diving one way or the other. The bird will not be able to steer quickly enough to remain on target and will miss you. The fact that you’re then lying crippled on the floor as the bird comes at you a second time to peck your eyes out is besides the point.
So it was apparent to me that creatures needed a lot more traction in order for their attacks to feel dangerous to the player. The player should still be able to dodge it, but not so easily. So I started thinking of the creatures less like birds and more like sharks in the sea. Water is a denser medium than air and therefore offers much better traction; observe how quickly fish can accelerate, decelerate and change direction. By simply simulating much more drag (air resistance) on the creatures, and increasing the amount of movement force they can use to compensate for it, they became a lot more agile.
Not only did this make their attacks on players more effective, but it also improved how manta rays hunt down beetles. And for an additional win; this new agility makes the creatures look far more spectacular than they did before!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECHSdV7o8lM
That’s all for now. We’ll be sure to catch up soon when we’ve got some more exciting stuff to show you.
Matkins