Slow Rush Studios logo,
    depicting an apprehensive-looking snail rushing forward

Slow Rush Studios

◂  Fiddling with Fire
News index
Big Bada Boom  ▸

Blooood

Contents

In the spirit of making death more fun, enemies & players now get crushed by moving bodies, and bleed when they get hit!

For now it's mostly you doing the bleeding, since you don't have a spell that does physical damage to enemies yet. But that'll come!

Blood Stains

Making a character (enemy or player) emit blood is just a question of adding a new red liquid & creating those atoms at the right time.

But I wanted the blood to have some impact on the environment:

Blood stains are a great visual cue that 'shit went down here'.

Under the hood, staining is very simple: blood atoms look along their projected velocity and change the color of atoms they're about to hit; when they run out of "staining power" then they disappear.

Blood atoms soak into the terrain almost instantly, but I'd love to change that & add some neat mechanic that uses nearby blood atoms somehow - ideas are welcome!

Gibbing

Enemies falling off a ledge used to just.. disappear.

But not anymore! I combined ragdolls with blood to add "gibbing":

Gib (verb): a complicated technical term, meaning explode & fling blood and guts everywhere.

Gibbing just creates the ragdoll parts without connecting up the joints between them - then stains 'em red.

Enemies who die by taking a lot of damage all at once should also gib, but I haven't gotten around to adding that yet.

Crushing Questions

When a character gets hit by a falling piece of wood, should it kill them or just hurt them?

You could say it depends on how much force the wood applies: more force -> more damage.

But if a large piece of wood falls onto you very gently, do you take a bit of damage each second until you slowly die? What if it's heavy enough that you can't move it - do you just end up stuck?

That didn't seem fun, so now enemies & players hit by fast-moving moving bodies die instantly:

Crushing also plays nice with blood stains on moving bodies (although, blood shouldn't be flung into the air by the moving body... hmm)

No doubt the exact threshold of what constitutes "fast-moving" will need some tweaking, but it'll do for now.

Playable web build‎

Alright, go paint the walls red with your own blood here:

Press F1 for help, including to see keyboard/mouse controls. Mobile devices probably won't work!

◂  Fiddling with Fire
News index
Big Bada Boom  ▸