When work began on developing Multi-Core Collider it was of the utmost importance that every match get more exciting over time. In similar types of games the arena itself would shrink over the course of the match. It was decided that Multi-Core Collider would instead explore the concept of damage and how it would effect the player’s decision making.

There are many games that have tried this before in various ways. For instance, in the Resident Evil series having sustained damage makes your character walk slowly and clumsily. However, with Multi-Core Collider mobility is key and should not be reduced in any way. A less abstract concept was conceived in which the spheres would have an armour-like cage which would fall to pieces as damage was incurred.

With this began work on creating various cage designs which could be animated to fracture and bust open upon impact:

For anyone who wants to geek over the technical aspects of this, some example code has been provided on the blog to show exactly what’s going on behind the scenes: http://inprincipleinc.com/Blog/2018/03/30/mc2-technical-the-importance-of-having-mass/

So where does mass come in to play? Each of the collisions in the game is controlled by the Unity physics engine, which already accounts for mass when two objects collide. Code is being used to alter the mass of each sphere independently as the player takes damage which will make the players sphere more vulnerable to flying off the platform and into the abyss.