Eat your Car(b)s

As promised, I've started prototyping an option to munch on the cars – a lot faster than I expected, too, but turns out this is a lot of fun to prototype!

At the moment, the animations are still very rough (which is why they keep nibbling on their own fingers) and the way it is set up, this will only work for small objects, really. For larger objects (or when the characters are still smaller) I will try to have them take a few chomps at the car before it disappears. Making that seamless is a bit of a challenge, but worst case the player will have to wait until they have grown a certain size, before they can stuff cars down their throat, heh.

Throat Bulge Animation

...Is that what you would call it? I'm not a 'vore' connoisseur, admittedly, but I'm sure there has to be a proper name for it, haha.

Either way, it definitely adds that cartoony, satisfying gulp!

This effect is polishing work, really, but I considered it kind of essential, and also it was just way too much fun to not implement right away, hah!

To make it work, I have added vertex displacement to the character shader: It now takes a position and fall-off parameter, to push vertices outwards:

A small 'Swallow Animator' helper script animates the shader parameters, to make sure they match the character animation. It's triggered from an animation event and takes care of calculating the necessary positions and fall-offs, to push the vertices around:

The parameters this script comes with are a bit esoteric; if I were to create a tool like this for third party users, I'd make sure they were more intuitive... but luckily I'll be the only one who has to mess with these values, so usability isn't really a major concern here, heh.

I've manually set up these animations for every character, to get the results that I thought feel the nicest, visually.

And here's a silly GIF of what you do not want it to look like...

Gameplay Considerations

I have not yet decided what effect eating the cars will have! A growth, speed or strength boost are all sensible options, I think. Maybe even a score/combo multiplier.

This is something I'll figure out during prototyping, hopefully. In the end, I definitely want the cars to present players with a number of interesting choices: Do I want to crush this car for points? Or maybe throw it for ranged damage? Or eat it? ...?

That could add some interesting complexity to the game! And if all else fails... it just looks fun to munch on them, haha.

What's Next?

Plenty to do on this feature. But I thought I'd share some of the progress early, just because it's so fun to look at!

The next couple of days I'm taking a break; I'll also be on vacation for a week or so, but there's a good chance I'll use a bunch of my time off to continue working on this – we'll see!

Hope you've enjoyed this little update, and thanks for your support!