Had a brainwave today amongst all the other stuff I was doing at work… “Build the levels out of physical objects!”

It works pretty well, certainly adds a whole level of emergent activity, I wouldn’t really call it gameplay as such… yet… still trying to work out fun ways to destroy the bad guys.

One idea I had was some sort of king of the hill type thing bonus points for the player who finishes on top of the stack.

I think the key will be to dig into the bowels of the physics system and record the forces acting on the rigid bodies and turn that into damage, at the moment I’m using the difference in the final velocity and it doesn’t really work for stationary objects that are getting squished!

Any hoo I’m off to New Zealand for a week of snow skiing and partying, see you all in a week.

Since I implemented the physics system into the “Ride the Fury” engine I’ve been thinking of gameplay ideas that might suit it. Mostly because programming the gameplay within a physically modeled environment is pretty hard.

There’s great emergent gameplay inherent in physics systems, the problem is your expectations of everything else becomes escalated, you expect to be able to bonk buster in the head and have him jam his mouth shut… easily done when he’s always standing up straight… what if he’s bouncing all over the place off walls and other busters?

 Anyhow this stupid idea has been bouncing around in my head the last couple of days and the inspiration for the digital drawing on the left… Clam jousting!

It’s basically the same as Williams Joust (right), with chicks riding flapping clams in a physically modeled world…it’s a million seller for sure!!!!