Hello Spellcasters, and welcome back to another Rune Record, as promised!
This week, we asked Alice to tell us about a feature, rune or mechanic in the game. Read on to see what they had to say!
I have alooooott of mechanics that I just loved creating but my all time absolute favourite is the Water rune! In case you never thought to combine Fire and Ice, that is how you access the Water magic effect!
Water was a really fun rune to design for a few different reasons. The first being it was the very first ‘combined’ magic effect, this being a rune that is only accessed when you combine other very specific other runes together. Because obviously if you try to make an object fire and also ice it wont work as those two elements cannot exist at the same time, so creating a system to account for this was a really fun workaround.
This opened the door for me design wise, because now if two rune combos didn't do anything themselves, I could just say, ‘oh well, I'll just design a unique third rune that they combine together to make.’ Making Rhell WAY more complex in the process, but allowing me to add my weird favourite effects >:]
Which brings me back to Water! Up until this point, all elements were solid objects as I had only created Fire, Ice and Goo. So, designing Water was an interesting challenge. I had to create a system that would handle collision with other objects, while also containing a separate collision system for Rhell to allow her to swim within what internally were still solid objects. And this system became MORE complex when I accounted for how other forms would interact with water in itself. It made Water unintentionally become one of the more complex mechanics in Rhell - allowing Rhell to swim in water, having metal Rhell sink to the bottom of water, conduct electricity through water, etc etc
Another standout key feature of Water is, what if Rhell becomes water? If you have tried doing this combo yourself you might find that Rhell transformed into water is REALLY useless. Honestly, with this I thought it would be funny to make puddle Rhell functionally useless, because if you become a puddle what would you even be able to do.
Though I got to code in some fun interactions!! Puddle Rhell conducts electricity, is small enough to fit in small gaps AND if you duplicate Rhell she will even get extinguished if one rhell is on fire and lands inside of puddle Rhell.
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You can peep a video of puddle Rhell over on Alice's instagram here - https://www.instagram.com/p/DWMfe27jVCL/
And that's all for this week folks!
