Studio 1 Week 11 - Particle Force Fields and Collisions

(NOTE: the current video is a little borked from the render process, I will re-upload shortly.)

This week, I continued to refine Gale's model from previous weeks, attempting to fix bugs (jitters in the particles movement) and add variability to her movement. During my Work In Progress presentation, I discussed how I wanted to change Gale's composition from rocks to sticks, leaves, dust - whatever her current environment was composed of. I was asked whether this would have any impact on the mechanics - would it change how she moves, her abilities, her health? I loved this idea and, although I had planned on creating more environments and concentrating on level design in my final weeks, I instead wanted to pursue this further and develop some of the mechanics necessary for such an idea.

Therefore, I wiped a lot of the properties from my particle systems and attempted to incorporate Force Fields instead: that way, the particles wouldn't actually be stuck to the model in any way, they would simply be attracted by the force fields (which move with the player). However, I had a lot of difficulty getting the particles to move around Gale in an aesthetically pleasing way: often, the forcefield would cause some particles to shoot off into the distance, or become "stuck" in a strange vortex of movement (see attached video). After a lot of trial and error, I decided to try something else: instead of having the particles being attracted and "following" Gale via the forcefield, I could "suck in" the particles and have them collide with Gale, then spawn them on a second particle system that was fixed to Gale's movement. This looked far better, and also allowed me to set up a system for "registering" particles Gale comes into contact with: these could be used to increase her health, speed, or abilities. 

During the time remaining in Studio 1, I will place Gale and these collectable particles in the game world and allow the player to move around and collect them, potentially modifying Gale's movement or abilities, in order to test this mechanic.