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 everyone, my name is Murillo and I’m a programmer on Worlds Adrift. One of the systems I’ve been tasked with programming is the weather walls that we spoke about a few weeks ago.
We wanted the walls to present serious challenges for players as they tried to cross them, having to fight through very strong winds to get to the other side. The storm needed to spin your ship around, buffet it with powerful gusts, and generally make it difficult to keep your bearings. The idea behind these is to make sure only capable enough ships may cross — if your ship isn’t powerful enough to overcome the wind, it will be dragged or spun around out of control.
These ideas worked fine in what some MMO veterans would call a “gear check” (a test where all you need to pass is a strong enough ship) but that wasn’t good enough for Worlds Adrift. Once you had the gear, crossing these storms didn’t feel very interesting and you weren’t afraid of doing so anymore. We knew we wanted player skill to be a really big part of dealing with the weather in Worlds Adrift even if you had a great ship, so we decided to spice things up a bit; we switched off some of the components for these constant forces, removed the constant spin and tried shooting gusts of wind at random intervals on different parts of the ship.
As these gusts are pushing a random part of the ship they also make the ship rock in all directions, forcing you to compensate at the helm to maintain the ship’s level. Being a good pilot definitely makes a difference!
When we first tried storms, a combination of bad guesses for how strong the gusts should be and a couple of poor implementation choices (a.k.a. bugs) meant the gusts’ maximum forces ended up way too strong. The ship would suddenly spin around its axis several times or get flung hundreds of metres away. Once that was all solved and we figured out balanced values for it, crossing storm walls felt much more hazardous and more what you would expect it should feel like.
Another hazard players will definitely have to deal with within storm walls are lightning strikes. As you fly through a storm, lightning will very likely hit and damage parts of your ship, which will require you to have some redundant parts or be very quick to repair if you want to stay afloat. We plan to expand this mechanic further in the future; for example, the damage a ship part takes will depend on the material it’s made of, and certain ship parts will malfunction when hit by lightning – but even in its current form it adds a lot to the challenge.
To round it off, we’ve added (and are still working on some more) special effects to really sell how dangerous crossing a storm wall is supposed to be. Screen shaking, rain particles and the crackling of thunder is what really seals the deal when it comes to making you afraid you won’t make it out of the wall in one piece.
This is still work-in-progress, but I hope it gets you excited at the prospect of braving the dangers of Worlds Adrift. I, for one, am anxious to see you all on the other side!