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At the end of 2024, when testing the addition of the mill, I did another cheat-free playthrough of the game. I made a mistake in my planning and had to remove a fairly large wall that I had accidentally placed two blocks to the right of where it had to go. Destroying it was a bit of a tedious, repetitive task. I couldve let my colonists do the work but I couldnt be bothered setting up a construction area.
It made me vividly realize that currently, destroying blocks is pretty. boring. A bar fills up, a block disappears, repeat. But in real life, smashing a brick wall is actually pretty exciting. Chunks fly off, rubble rolls and falls everywhere.
Why shouldnt Colony Survival be like that? I instantly thought that I wanted to make the direction of destroying the block matter. Make it more interactive, less repetitive. Give players the choice to direct all the rubble into a specific direction.
So thats the new big change were working on! We currently have an internal dev build where this works fairly well.
We used a shatter algorithm to break a 3D cube into many fractured parts. We took some of the smaller parts and use them when you are in the process of breaking a block. Where your cursor hits the block, little chunks fall off.
When the block itself disappears, large chunks spawn inside of the now empty space, and they fly away based on gravity and the direction of your mining efforts.
The fractured parts from the shatter algorithm work very well for stone blocks. But they make less sense for other blocks like leaves and wooden planks. So weve added more types of chunks, each fitting to a different groups of blocks.
Testing the new chunks is a joy. Its really fun to make big piles of rubble and to watch them bounce down slopes and tunnels. One of the first things I instinctively tried was letting them drop into water. At first, all the chunks sunk down to the bottom as if the water wasnt there. Which kinda makes sense for stone rubble but not for leaves or wood! So now weve also assigned different weights to the rubble, making some float and others not.
For now, youll have to enjoy the rubble in the static screenshots in this blog. But they do look pretty amazing when you can actually see them moving, so were planning to share a video in the next blog!
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