![]() It hovers an inch off the ground, because the actual-ground is never taken away when you move the hole over it. But again he had to make a choice, and he decided that his hole would be an object. He probably didn’t figure he’d get into the ontology of holes when he started the joke jam game. So, is the ground holed when I move to hole to it, or is the hole itself an object?” “In doing research for it I realised there isn’t a consensus on whether a hole is an object or an object has a condition that is holed. “There are so many funny things about this game,” he says. So, what happens when something falls into the hole? “Well, OK.” Esposito laughs with an ever so slightly maniacal edge again. “Once I did that, I knew it was the right decision because people stopped making comments about it and started commenting that the physics feels really good, and so I was like, OK, I guess I have to fake more things in this game.” “Should I fake it? Or should I stand my ground and say that this is how physics works, it’s supposed to fall slowly.” He chose to fake it, scaling up gravity with objects’ size and how large they appear on the screen, aiming for them to behave the same as a tiny object. This is the cause of the floaty feel big physics objects in games can have: it’s an issue of our expectation for how big things should fall, and Esposito sat on the choice of how to deal with it for a long time. “I found that small objects behaved really nicely and they looked great and fell at the right rates and felt nice and snappy, but as I scaled up, because of the way physics works, every object gets the same amount of force applied to it by gravity, and gigantic objects seem to fall extremely slowly.” ”That was actually one of the big questions I had going into the serious development of this game,” he says. But scale and game physics have an uneasy relationship. ![]() You usually start a level at the scale of grass and stones, and as your hole consumes objects it grows, taking you up to the scale of houses. This is why physics objects in games can sometimes break through solid walls.Įsposito had to stretch more physics rules when it came to creating Donut County’s breadth of scale. ![]() There are therefore multiple planes of ground to prevent objects from ‘tunnelling’ through it, which is what happens when fast-moving objects move so far within the span of a frame that no part of their mesh technically hits the ground. He therefore had to juggle the size of the area that the game considers part of the hole universe and to enforce all the usual bizarre physics safeguards that games need to make them credible. So, for example, there was a time when if you quickly moved the hole away from an object that was teetering into it, the object would tend to explode up into the air or down through the ground. “So there’s a lot of duct tape wrapped around everything to try to seal it up.” Esposito laughs, maybe slightly too merrily. As Esposito implemented it, he soon realised that his implementation was tied to the peculiarly inconstant nature of game physics. ![]() It feels like you’re moving this hole in the ground, but it’s actually switching back and forth between these two worlds.” “And then when you move the hole under it, now it falls off the rim into the hole. The hole itself is a polygon cylinder with an area of ground all around it, so when the object switches, you won’t notice anything. When an object gets within range of the hole, it stops respecting the normal ground and starts respecting the hole’s physics. The secret of the hole is that Donut County runs two physics universes at once, the hole’s world and the real one. (“It’s the last thing you should do if you’re a physics game,” Esposito says.) That would all come later, but the jam game set the fundamentals for the trick the game pulls to deal with the fact that physics engines are fundamentally not really supposed to make holes in the ground. To start with, Donut County was his entry to the Peter Molydeux game jam, What Would Molydeux? Made in a hurry, it was rough enough that Esposito didn’t really worry too much about little things like the way objects interacted with the edge of the hole and collided with each other as they fell in. ![]()
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