Toxologic is a First Person puzzle platformer, revolving around all the amazing things you can do with the most popular character in videogames: Crates. From the beginning, we planned to use effects to emphasize and re-enforce the player’s interaction with them.The very first mechanic introduced to the player in toxologic is the concept of the force and freeze arrows. Put simply, the force arrows move crates, while the freeze arrows freeze them in place. While the force arrows were fairly simple to understand, many people had problems trying to figure out when the freeze effect would wear off. Taking this into consideration, i designed a shader that would create an overlay texture that would disappear at the same rate as the freeze cooldown. This made it much simpler to see when the effect would wear off, and allowed us much more flexibility when designing puzzles.
Next, we had the squash and stretch arrows. In a similar fashion to the freeze arrow, we wanted to provide visual feedback that was linked to the arrow that hit the crate. For these, I created similar shaders to the freeze shader that would overlay a wipe vertically or horizontally over the geometry, to signify *magical* squashing and stretching. In order to make sure the overlay did not distort horribly while the geometry stretched and squashed, I used a bit of shader math to create the overlays. This way, no matter how the geometry was modified, the overlays would remain consistent throughout the transition.
Finally, I added effects for the AI. In our game the Minotaur’s main attack in Toxologic was throwing crates. As we were play-testing we didn’t feel the crates were threatening enough. We decided the best way to solve this was to make the crates explode of course…
I took the original high poly crate mesh and split it into about 40 pieces. We attached rigid bodies to the pieces and set the prefab to swap with the crate mesh upon a strong enough impact. The pieces also maintain the momentum of the crate at the time of impact to complete the dynamic explosion effect.All in all, i’m pretty happy with how the crates turned out. Crates usually don’t have this many features, and so it presented a unique challenge when designing effects. Hopefully the visual feedback provided by the effects helps players to better understand our mechanics and lets them solve puzzles easier!