Looking at the two fields together the first thing I realized was that their accelerations from a dead stop were nearly identical, and no amount of tuning values was giving me the differentiation I needed. So I built a “momentum” system in to the heavy field. I took a portion of the player’s current velocity, and applied it as an additional force to the field. This allowed me to lower the amount of force applied to accelerate the heavy field, slowing its acceleration, without compromising its top speed. Now you could really feel that build of momentum in the Heavy Field! Unfortunately lowering its acceleration that much had made it nearly impossible to turn, at high speed. My solution was the speed boost ability. Adding a speed boost that applied in whatever direction the player was pressing on the left control stick, gave the player the ability to turn the Heavy Field at high speed again. It also gave the player a way to quickly recover from hitting an obstacle, and a way to build speed before reaching a jump or ramp. This also made the game quite a bit easier, which was another of our early design challenges. The final step was to give the speed boost a cool down period. This prevented the player from being able to use it constantly to turn the Heavy Field, or to instantly reach top speed. I also tweaked some of the Heavy Fields other physical properties, most notably changing its physics to greatly reduce the amount it bounced. Now I had a Heavy Field which accelerated slowly under its own power, but built to a very high top speed, and while the player did have control over the field, there was a constant danger of being caught without the speed boost, giving a feeling of pushing to the edge of control.

Feel Heavy: check, High Top Speed: Check, Slow Build of Acceleration: Check, Very Little Bounce: Check, Limited Control: Check.

Looking good!

Next I looked to the Light Field, while it had effective low gravity, I was limited on how low I could make it without having the player fly off the top of the map with every jump they hit and they could still build up a lot of speed while falling, it just took a little longer. The players wanted to feel an instant difference between the two fields when switching to light, especially in the air, they wanted to feel more like they were floating. The solution was to give the Light Field a brake that applied only when travelling downwards above a certain velocity threshold.

Similarly to the momentum system on the Heavy Field, this brake is based on the Z-Axis velocity of the Light Field, the faster it’s moving, the stronger the brake. Now when switching to the Light Field, they player get’s a feeling of being buoyed up, and the threshold to engage the brake gave me control over the max fall speed of the Light Field. I then applied a slightly modifed version of this same brake to the horizonal speed of the light field. This allowed me to increase the force moving the field, thus higher acceleration, but still lower top speed than the heavy field. Along with greatly increasing the amount of bounce, the Light Field, now felt light, and the testers felt it too!

Feel Light: Check, High Upwards Velocity: Check, .Low Downwards Velocity: Check, Bouncy: Check, Lower Top Speed than Heavy Field