Those of you who have been following the development may notice that the visuals have taken a step back, and that this level is much less dense with interaction than previous ones. But that's because the prototype has taken a big step forward in terms of being able to accommodate complex terrain geometry.

Much of the work over the last few months has consisted of making the character follow the terrain as it moves (a.k.a. ground clamping). Ground clamping isn't too hard when your levels consist exclusively of boxes, sometimes with a slight tilt. You just have to give your character a slight gravity, just enough to prevent bunny hopping at their fastest speed. But after so long, the heart yearns for something more. Something undulating and polygonal. For this, something much more sophisticated than the bog-standard ground force is required.

Complex navigational geometry in modern game engines means running collision checks on a mesh. And collision checks on mesh colliders just don't run that fast. Constantly shoving the character into the floor creates a jittery behavior as the engine struggles to keep the character from falling through it between physics frames. But a more reasonable force entirely fails to prevent the character from launching off every little bump like Evil Knievel. 

What's needed is to allow the character controller to read the terrain like braille. It must know the angle of the ground on which it rests at all times, and then tilt it's own momentum to follow it. That's not how things work in real life, but in real life you can't jump twice your own height. 

When, after three months of grinding at it, at last I managed to force just enough geometry into my brain to write that elusive line of code to do this, I was elated. And yet I wasn't sure I'd ever take advantage of my work. My test level resembled the cover of a 90s math textbook; a drunken melange of glossy 3d shapes. It was satisfying enough to me to watch my character controller grip the curves of my test level, but would it make a difference to players?

In the current build, you'll find my attempt to start answering that question. A friend recommended ProBuilder and it's an absolute godsend for rapidly prototyping geometry. Even making the most rudimentary level geo has caused me to fall out of love with the cubeland of previous iterations. The undeniable fact is that walking across a serpentine stone bridge is just way more fun than walking across a box.

So we're getting closer to answering the ultimate question of 'what do Fleder levels look like'

apparently the answer is *not* like an exploded model of a Rubik's cube