I’m slightly surprised at how rarely anyone asks us about how the lights for In The Dark work. I guess most people assume that the lights are not much different from lights in any other game, but in fact they are very different. In most games lighting is handled more or less entirely on the graphics card, with little or no feedback to the rest of the game. Also in most techniques lighting only has to be roughly accurate. Obviously, In The Dark requires a high level of accuracy and feedback or the game would be unplayable. In fact the lighting for In The Dark is handled almost entirely using the physics engine as it is a physical object within the game world.

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One problem I ran into recently while working on the demo for ITD (which hopefully will be done soon) was making the boss level physically long enough. This boss chases Bump until you beat him, so the level needs to vary in length depending on how much time that takes. In The Dark wasn’t really developed with this sort of level in mind, but luckily there is a fairly simple way around that. The test version of this level looks like this:   
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Making Bump move 100% the way I would like him to is impossible. But by the time In The Dark is finished, I hope that he will move how I want him to at least 99.9% of the time. In The Dark only relies heavily on physics because it has to, if I were making a traditional platformer or something I would write my own collision system. I’m stupid for relying on the physics any more than I absolutely necessary,  but over time I’ve removed almost all of the physics properties from bump, and really just rely on it for collision and as a means to consistently propel him around.

So why are physics engines so bad for handling characters in games, or really anything in games other than crates and barrels? (sure see a lot of those in games nowadays, huh?) The problem stems from classic games, you can lay most of the blame with Mario. In classic games (this applies to 3D as well as 2D) there wasn’t really any processing power to handle realistic momentum, collision, or even acceleration so games cheated. At the same time, speed and scales were exaggerated to make the games more fun and skill based. Everyone started copying the early games that did this, and now it’s so ingrained in most gamers that when a game attempts a realistic simulation it “feels wrong.”

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Recently we added this wobbling animation for when Bump is in a precarious position:

The only problem is our existing footing detection for Bump wasn’t really capable of the kind of precision to make the animation play at the right times. Traditional platformers have very simple systems for making these decisions, most use grids and have no support for rotation. Obviously when using a physics engine and having dynamically generated platforms like In The Dark’s lights, things get more complicated.  Bump’s footing detection has gone through five different major versions since we started.

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