Pirats

Description

Evil pirate rats are coming for your cheese! Defend your tavern together using strategically placed traps and weapons.

Just like our last game, I dedicated myself to physics. There was a lot to fix, develop and polish. The main focus was to get ragdolls working well without any crashes as this was a planned and definitely needed feature for this game. I spent many days trying different methods to make the ragdolls more stable.

I tried limiting the forces applied to the joints, but this just made the ragdoll fall down instead of flying away. I tried damping the joints to prevent them from going crazy, but the ragdoll would feel like it was moving through honey. Whatever I tried seemed to have no positive effect and the ragdolls would alway cause a crash eventually.

In the end, I ended up finding a function better suited for applying forces to an articulation. This together with applying a smaller force to every joint and making sure that the velocities stay below a certain threshold, the ragdolls now fly around exactly how I wanted. This makes the spring trap and bomb very satisfying to use.

While developing the physics system, I was also helping in other areas like the trap placement system and upgrade system. For the upgrade system, I provided a foundation in the form of some macros and base classes to make it easier to create new upgrades without much extra work.

Project Details