Capstone: Always More

This week as not as productive on my end as I hoped, and this morning I felt the consequences of my actions.  The past 7 days have been filled with physics, operating system, ASP.net , Android programming, as well as trying to meet a deadline at my job.  Something had to take a hit and sadly this week it was capstone.  I only got to put in a few hours,  most of which I will be making up for Sunday at our weekly work till you drop meeting.  However few it was, it was rather productive.

One of the major requests from my designers is to make what they are calling the slipstream.  The slipstream is a series of nodes that once places will generate particles between them.  The player when making contact with this particles with the correct color shield will be dragging allow in the direction of the facing shield.  This will allow our players to take a break from the action while still traveling at high speed.  It's also perfect for making controlled direction choices.

The funny thing about this feature is while I stated above that it was planned to make you move in the direction of the facing shield, that only happened due to accidental functionality emergence in the way I created the feature.  The slipstream works by when the player collides with one of the particles with their shield out and on they hook onto it and the player changes his position to the particle he is colliding with.  However due to how close together the particles are the player does not ride along with a particle but keeps jumping to the next one.  This means that depending on the way the player faced their shield they could control the way in which they went.  This let itself to some really interesting gameplay due to the fact that we can now set up choice gates where the player can decided to get off early, follow, another path, or go back the way they came all from within the slipstream.  It makes it a decision based rest section rather than a free ride.

The currently implementation still has some bugs and smoothing to be fully functional and ready to be given to the designers but it is definitely a step in the right direction and quite an interesting discovery that only adds to the possibilities of slip streams which I could quickly see becoming a testers favorite in the upcoming weeks. Slip streams should hopefully be hitting the QA labs this Tuesday so if you wanna try them yourself  come on down , testing starts at 6:30.

That's all for this week,

-Ian