Nidus: a breeding ground or a place in an animal or plant where bacteria or other organisms lodge and multiply
A work in progress featuring:
dynamic shading
water effects
mini map
multitouch control
complex physics
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Already said it in another thread, but this legitimately looks amazing. I’d love to know how you’ve pulled off the water and lighting effects if you don’t mind sharing some info?
For the shading I used my Dynamic Shader which utilizes composite paint and normal maps on an enterframe loop.
For the water I use several layers of color and texture which move and adjust their alpha slightly depending on where the character is - lending a translucent effect. For the waves I used transition2 and a lot of trial and error.
One of my biggest game-making conceptual breakthroughs came a couple years ago when I realized that in games (and sometimes life) perception trumps reality (pun intended). I was working really hard with a project to make all the physics interactions mathematically precise but noticed that people responded better to how they thought physics worked instead of how it actually does.Â
As an artist, I know all about tricking the mind into perceiving things the way I want them understood, so I changed my programming philosophy to be more like my approach art. Those waves don’t have to look like or function as waves - if you can get it just right, they only have to be a suggestion of waves.
I’ll have to play with composite effects more. I’ve used them, but not for anything too fancy yet. It sounds like your water effect works similarly to my smoke effect in Lights Out, but the lighting makes everything far more impressive.
I’m not a designer myself, (we hire contractors for that), but I understand the concept of imperfections being more visually comforting. You’re bang on with that - mathematically perfect design just isn’t aesthetically pleasing. Try to design a font where the letters are all perfectly aligned to each other and you come across all sorts of problems.
Most racing games have been milking this for decades… No one wants to crash on their first corner!
You’ve clearly never watched me play Mario Kart 
This looks fascinating. Nice job!
By the way, how did you create those caverns and give them those “grass/moss strokes”? I’ve been thinking about how I’d implement such things but I’ve always drawn a blank when it comes to feasible solutions.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree with the perceived reality versus actual reality. When people play games, they don’t really want true realism. Even though games with physics simulate real world physics, they stop short from actually doing realistic simulations. Why? Because playing an FPS game would suck if your character would break his or her legs and/or spine after falling/jumping down 5-10 meters 
The caverns were inspired by the Terrain plugin on the marketplace. I love that plug in but I needed more so I basically wrote my own.Â
(@SGS - thus the turtle speed) I still use Terrain to generate the landscape vertices but then I use my own custom fill module.
vertices —> object and fill
vertices —> chain body physics
vertices —> outline (outline remains when the world goes dark)
between vertices —> fill with a graphic (grass/moss) - rotate graphic and and adjust the x1, x2, x3, x4 paths
I’m working on physics-based grass and sea grass for the game and resource collection but the rough cut sample video is really just a selection of the finished elements.
I think it would be a great match for Apple Arcade - going by what they say they are looking for - so I’ve been scrambling to finish my submission. This was only the first pass but I really wanted to share it now.
It will be a well-crafted game that takes risks with genre, style and convention - something Apple favors.
Oh, yeah. I also made a custom particle generator for the water bubbles, splashes and drips
WOW! That looks stunning, and I love the music as well.
Definitely on my list to watch out for.
It just looks great.
Also great choice of musicÂ
Yes, excellent music!  
Check out more of Luca’s music on the Corona Marketplace - Frequently Asked Music
It looks pretty good!
It looks great
Really amazing! Nice job! I love the shader 
@Iduriat I’ve got more versions of worms too - like leeches and snakes and centipedes.
Tremors 2 and 3Â
The music is in a psychodelic way - very nice, very good for a relaxed gameply.