The mechanics behind the doors

Hello everyone!

This week we'll catch up with some programming! It may seem it's left behind, but without it, the game won't ever be a reality!

So, imagine you have a door right in front of you, or maybe to rephrase it, your CHARACTER has a door right in front of him. How should the overall interaction mechanic work?

There is actually a misconception on how the overall system works. As you'd expect, you simply hit the "Interact" button ( E ) on the door and then by moving the mouse you merely open or close the damn thing.

Actually, it's not that simple. Because it matters from which point you actually look at the door. and we are not even there yet! As we were testing our the overall interaction, we found out that the character's orientation towards that surface of the door matters as well.

So, how come a simple door-opening mechanic turns out to be such a code disaster? It's because of the numerous violent math calibrations, tests and adjustments that need to be made beforehand. That's even before we start coding!!!

So, as you can guess, the tough part was to design the whole mechanic and then cry in frustration, as the mechanic itself needed testing, and there were the newfound bugs!

The door had to have a specific joint on the wall, the door had to have specific angles, degrees if you like to keep it fully open and fully closed. A mechanism that controlled whether the door was absolutely closed or fully open had to be implemented, and some UX-friendly snapping mechanics were to be implemented to keep the player from losing his sanity (Yes, there is a sanity system!).

But, as it turned out, we were the ones losing our sanity after hours and hours and hours of design trying to find out which surface of the door the player is pointing at, and what's the player's orientation on that surface. Yes, he may be looking at the front surface, but the interaction mechanic would be different if the character would face the door on the right-most part or the left-most part because that would change the intended interaction the player would expect from the door!

That's all I am gonna write in this dusty journal for today.

Until next week :)

Concept Art : Behind the scenes

Hello people!

This is Kostas, reporting from Project AH (We really need to consider a name for our game to be honest!), progress is smoother than ever with both artists and programmers functioning at full capacity. Doors, cubes hunting us through narrow corridors, stealth inside wardrobes and the interactivity level is over 9000 !!!

Last week, we presented to you some sick concept art drawn by our Concept Artist and Art Director, Eliza Marinou.

This time, we will take you behind the scenes and let the whole blog post talk about itself in this great time-lapse video which shows exactly how Alma and Albert were made:

Until next time, were we will show you some sweet progress from the programming perspective!