Thingy is now “Rescue Robots Save The Tiny Space Men” or RR for short. There’s some other flash game named robot rescue, but I don’t think this is similar enough for it to be a problem.

I’m polishing up my resume pieces at the moment, so RR got a bit of a workover. I’ve added little big planet style infinite skyboxes, and wrote a “mario” style ship controller.

A friend of mine donated a model out of his personal portfolio for the test work. I am very thankful!

I’m pretty familiar with mario, but tuning a real physics prop to behave like him is hard. Like we discovered when we wrote the grapple hook, every time you try and cheat the physics sim, you end up paying for it in some edge case later on.

Some interesting notes: Jumping is really “thrusting”. Mario has variable height jumping because each frame you hold down jump, a little more “up thrust” is added on. If you hit your head on something or run out, the per-frame jump thrust stops. Mario is also tuned to jump at about the opposite speed of gravity, and for the whole jump to last about one second going up, one second going down.

You can’t not have friction on your jump-man object. I originally had none (it makes it so you slide down walls you attempt to push against), but then the first time it stood on a moving object, it slid out from under. So friction is turned on or off depending. Running: Off, Falling/Jumping: Off, Standing Around: On.

Keeping the collision model “upright” wasn’t too bad either, use a powerful “motor” to cancel out any rotations. I also rounded off the bottom of the collision shape so that small steps and ramps are handled gracefully and without the need of q3 style “step up” code and tests. Actually the jury is still out on that one, having a square collision shape on the bottom corners would make negotiating edges of platforms easier. Right now you tend to slip off.

The rest of it is just judiciously applying forces for running and stopping, and wiring up nice animation code.

Not cheating too much for the prop means that it interacts correctly with all the other physics in the game, so moving platforms and rotating objects all behave sanely. This should make for really easy, lots-of-moving-rotating-stuff level design. Pushing, being squashed, and stacking blocks all works natively, too.

Still working on my Xbox 360/PC  “thrust” puzzle game.  Its still called “thingy”, and I’m still looking for artists to get involved for level design, enemy and environment work.  It’s supposed to be a modern take on the thrust genre, perhaps what would happen if  ’little big planet’ and thrust had had babies.  

The build I’ve posted doesn’t focus on combat at all, instead its prototyping off some of the physics and puzzles that are available.   Real levels will be a much more gradual mix of exploring, puzzle solving and shooting.

The build is available here.  http://www.mydevstuff.com/thingy/Thingy_Preview_Release.rar

You will need both the .net 2.0 runtime and the xna 3.1 redistributable to play this on your PC, both are available over at microsoft.

If you want to get involved or just want to leave me feedback,  email me at pmcneill@athiadev.com

Update: You’ll need a pretty decent video card to run this, pixel shaders 2.0 or later. Ive got friends who have it running on a 7200, which is pretty close to the hardware inside a 360.. so that makes sense.