Suzy Cube Update: February 3, 2017

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Let's go for a water-log ride this week in Level 3-4!

Try Not to FALL

Work on Level 3-4 progresses nicely. I had to play around with a setting on the player collider in order to fix an annoying collision bug that almost only showed up on this level. Hopefully, I was able to solve the other, more elusive, instances of the bug at the same time.

As is probably evident from the screenshot up top, Level 3-4 is set in a water rich forest and will ask Suzy to navigate floating logs and drifting rafts. 

So far, I've got the opening section done, which meant getting the waterfalls and motion of the platforms working properly.

After a couple of false start experiments, I settled on the scrolling texture effect seen here:

Scrolling texture waterfall

This is a simple scrolling UV shader. The same, in fact, used many times already for other scrolling water and lava effects. In wanting to reuse my existing water material and texture, I found myself having trouble making a good looking yet properly stylized effect until I had the epiphany to simply map by water surface to a simple straight gradient but with offset UVs to create the wavy pattern.

Water plane with split mesh

The texture used is an atlas of several colour swatches and scrolling effects. The water plane's UVs are squished and mapped to the gradient strip near the middle of the texture.

Water plane UVs

The offset UVs of the individual quads create the wavy pattern. With added particle effects, the finished waterfall comes together.

Splish splash

Neither Here nor There

It can, sometimes, be difficult to maintain actual spatial continuity between different sections of a complex level. For this reason, cheating is sometimes the answer.

Case in point, in order to link this first bit of the level to the next one, I've opted to have Suzy enter a cave entrance which, in fact, teleports her to a small link-up area which gives the impression that she is running behind the waterfall in order to emerge somewhere else!

A stroll behind the falls

It's movie magic!

Well, there you have it. My week has been all about Level 3-4 and non-Suzy related duties. I'm going to keep working on the level this afternoon and hope to have it in good shape by early next week in order to get started on the next one.

See you all next week!