Smashing!

I’ve been slacking the past few weeks as far as posting goes (though ive made lots of progress on the game) so I thought I should post at least a small morsel of newness:  This little snippet shows another fun effect that’s easy to add due to the fact that all characters are already simulated as rigid body ragdolls.  Ice bombs are gonna be a lot more gratifying to use now. 🙂

Teaching Spaz to Walk

Like I mentioned before, the upside of switching all animation in the game to be procedural (simulated) instead of keyframe-animated is that you get fun stuff like jiggling and whiplashing for free.. the downside is that you’re now essentially dealing with a robot in a simulated physical world, so you have to teach it to move itself around the same as you would with a robot in the real world: using joints and motors and this and that…which is fun but challenging.  Here you can see poor Spaz with his new motorized legs not doing a very good job at walking just yet.

First Official Character: Spaz

..So the last big-ticket item on my BombSquad todo list is to remake all the characters.  I have an existing set of them, but half of them are celebrities I put in there jokingly for playing with my friends and the other half are a bit old and simplistic.  Either way, I need to replace them all, and I’m proud to say I’ve got my first shiny new one pretty much done:  Spaz the space marine.

One down, like 6 or so to go…

Epic Controller Stress Test

I needed to run some tests to make sure BombSquad was behaving itself with lots of controllers connected, so I decided to make a video while I was at it. If the game is ultra-successful I might make back the money I’ve spent on all these controllers 🙂

Wheee; Ragdoll Physics!

Awww; my first ever youtube upload… this is one of my old characters blowing himself up a few times to test my newly re-written character physics in BombSquad.  I wrote the game back in the day with characters represented by two simple spheres within the physics simulation, but last week I reworked them be much more complex; simulated as more or less a full ragdoll skeleton consisting of about 12 different pieces.  This will make it easy to do fun stuff like bouncing and flailing arms and whiplashing heads, but the downside is that it’s gonna take a lot of balancing to get the play-control feeling right again… so back to work…

 

The stuff of Eric Froemling