The Potion

I wanted to get a break stuff and loot system working visually. This is the MVP barrel and HP item.

It was difficult to tame the chaos simulation. Out of the gate, I had two problems; firstly, the barrel was very fragile and would break when I tried to platform on the barrel. Second, the speed of the sword created some wild inertia on the barrel pieces, which made it difficult to get a consistent break. I had to make a custom collision type for the blade and isolate the collision overlap of the barrel to just that type. After that, I needed to recreate the impact by placing a radial impulse at the point of impact so I could control the inertia regardless of the type of sword attack being thrown. Finally, I had to create some collision for platforming which terminates on impact so that the barrel still felt physical to the player.

Compared to the barrel, the overlap collection of the hp flask is pretty straightforward. I wanted to keep the gameplay quick for pickups like these but in the future, I might explore pickups that prompt you to hit a button to collect the item.

The potion shader is pretty simple, I have a couple of layers of the same bubble mask scrolling at different speeds and scales to create the illusion of depth. So, no true parallax is happening but it keeps the material lightweight and can be done with one material. I chose to scroll the bubbles in the emissive channel to highlight the potion in the dark corners of the dungeon.

The sound effects are from freesound.org and the ambient music is from whitebat audio.