A Familiar Tale

Player with PhysX

I was fortunate enough to get to work on the player for the entire project. One of the biggest problems I encountered was using the character controller in PhysX. I started developing my Player in a Player gym that I got from the level designers. This worked really well since I could try everything from jump height to the feel of the player early on in the project. But when we got everything ready to try the player in a real level we got a lot of problems where the player got stuck in falling state between rocks and going from ground to falling and vice versa every frame. I made several tweeks to how we interface with the PhysX character controller to improve the player. In addition to that I worked closely with the level designers to remove as many places where the player didn’t behave well as possible.

I decided early on in the project that I wanted to use a state machine for the player, which was very successful. One of the best parts about using the state machine was that it was really easy to play animations on the player. I had to collaborate with the animators a lot to get the player to feel and look good which I think is one of the most important parts in a 3D platformer.