Warm Breeze

Our character, and his ability animations have been a lot of fun to build and animate. We feel that he has really come to life, in a sense, since we began this project. Although one thing we want to avoid is having an animated character and a really static environment. To avoid this, we've been working on ways to bring the environment to life as well. One of the ways is by having some small wildlife such as insects and birds moving about, but a more dynamic solution is that we're also going to fake a sort of "wind" behavior in some of the world's objects. Here is a screenshot of an early test environment to give some frame of reference:



The grass, leaves, and anything that is light enough within the environment will be affected by this "wind" effect that moves through the environment. It is essentially an invisible wall that passes across the player's immediate area, and has a push affect on the objects that are flagged to be affected by it. This will cause them to sway in a wave as though the wind is moving them.

While this system is very simple, it allows us some other fun options as well. We can have invisible physics effects come off the player as well, so that when you run through tall grass, your projected effects mix with the overall wind effect to make the grass not only come alive, but also to unify the player character with the environment through a sort of indirect interaction.

This wind system is still in it's early stages, so a video of the effect in action might be a little ways off. I'll end this blog post with another few screenshots:





Any questions can be directed to: info@thothinteractive.com
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