So to eliminate all the psychic stress, there is no time pressure in the
game, and failure is almost impossible. There are no elements that will trap players, and they can pick up and
leave at any time with no repercussions.
While our gameplay prototyping was going on, focused on mechanics and camera controls, the
programming team had several other hurdles they knew they had to face. The most important, obviously,
was the simulation of believable, malleable, and computationally practical clouds. The team
came up with an interesting solution: the use of a Leonard-Jones particle simulation underlying the
clouds that would give them a dynamic underlying structure that would feel like playing with globs of
mercury.
The ?¬? rst implementation of this concept was most useful in the fact that it proved we could create
???clouds??? out of clumps of dynamic particles??”and that we would be able to support a lot of them. The
images below of the particle simulation
prototypes show the result of several
thousand particles in a prototype
environment that are (thankfully) not
overtaxing the machine.
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