Donut World
Donut World is the begining of a 3D first-person driving-around-shooting-your-friends game.
It was going to have 3 features which i thought were pretty neat:
-
Hello-Kitty-Levels of Cuteness
- Hearts & Stars for bullets, frowny clouds, dancing rainbow explosions. You get the idea.
-
Physics based customizable crafts & weapons
- The ships in this version are rigid bodies simulated by spring networks,
which i found worked pretty well and cheaply, and i was able to quickly build it
from the ground up versus interface w/ a third-party physics library.
- The ships are modeled sort of after the land-speeder in star wars,
where it inherently hovers some distance above the ground, but bobs like a boat
in water. Each ship is a rectanglar solid, with 8 thrusters, one at each corner.
Each thruster can swivel to provide thrust in different directions.
So entirely with phsyical simulation, the craft can zoom around, turn, ascend, etc.
Thru a feedback system, the thrusters also automatically stabilize the craft,
keep it Upright, and levitate it some desired distance above the ground.
You can see the thrusters swivel and fire as you play, or if you look closely in the screenshots.
-
The playing-field would be a large, planet-oid sized torus, rather than a globe or basically
planar terrain. I felt this would provide for interesting playing dynamics. As well, accurate
gravity for a toroid would be computed for crafts in orbit. "yoyo"
is an earlier pass at this same idea, except where Donut World got further in the Driving-Around department,
"yoyo" does more in the Toroidal-Planetoid one.
