One of the major features of Blastronaut full game is starting to get shape - The Bugs.


The procedurally generated infinite world has caused many challenges:

• The enemies have to be able to traverse an extremely complex block terrain.
• The enemies can't rely on any pre-generated data like navigation meshes.
• The performance is quite critical and the bugs that got outside the screen have to be disabled and later enabled.

We experimented with different methods, but ultimately the leg based movement worked the best.  This means that at any given time the bug only knows in which direction it wants to move - left or right. Then one by one it puts the last leg to the front and makes a ray trace down to make sure where he should place it. If the leg is higher or lower than the body it pulls the whole character along allowing it to climb upwards or downwards. Once the leg gets stuck into a wall or is over the ledge it will decide what to do - turn around or in this case rotate to the side. This last part was especially tricky to implement as it made the local and global coordinates entangled in strange ways. But eventually, we managed to get it working and I think the result was worth the effort.


I hope this insight was interesting to read. Definitely try the Blastronaut demo if you haven't done it yet. And wishlist the game on Steam.