Throwing Cars, Almost Done

Here is some footage of cars getting flung around – again!

I have made a bunch of progress since the last iteration. So much so that I'm entering 'polishing' territory!

Here is a quick overview of the most important changes:

• Damage on impact
• Visualization of thrown object's trajectory
• Cars require a player minimum/maximum size, to be picked up and thrown
• Tweaked throw physics
• Improvements of controls
• Fixes, tweaking, etc...

A lot of what I am doing, right now, is tweaking all kinds of different parameters, to improve the overall feel. This is a very tricky part and difficult to get right, but I want to make sure it feels as nice and intuitive as I can possibly manage!

Other than a bunch of tweaking and polishing, what's still missing from this feature? Not much, actually! Originally, I planned to maybe have a way to vary the force/strength of the throw – but I have scratched that, to keep things simple! (Both for me and the player.)

Thank you, Wikipedia

Special shout out to Wikipedia, for helping me figure out projectile motion, haha.

You see, while I am using Unity's physics engine to throw the car, I have to manually calculate the trajectory in advance, to visualize it.

And to get physically accurate results, you have to do.... actual math? Math tough.

Luckily, Wikipedia got me covered. So, here's what those formulas look like, when translated into code:

What's next?

Like I said, there are still a few things I want to tweak and polish for this feature, but overall I'm very happy with how things are looking. And while polishing can get very exhausting, I'm having a lot of fun throwing the cars around – and hope folks will enjoy it just as much!

One thing I want to give a quick try after the throwing mechanic is done, is an option to eat the cars, instead.

But no promises, just yet. It's a feature that has been requested a few times, and it could definitely work well with the rest of the gameplay; in terms of implementation, most of the necessary things are pretty much in place already, too! Just have to make a few changes here and there and put together a quick chomp animation, to see how it'd go.

If I end up prototyping this, y'all will be the first to know, of course! And if you have thoughts on this feature, feel free to share them here, haha!

Other than that, I still need to take care of SFX, which I should get started on rather sooner than later. But that should be something that can largely run in parallel to other dev work.

As always, thanks for your support!