Razorlocks Update – Runner’s Ridge Visuals

Here’s a look at updated visuals for the Runner’s Ridge level in Razorlocks. This mostly represents the target visual fidelity for the level in the final game, maybe with the addition of some more polish and details.

It took nearly a year to get it looking this good, mainly due to experimentation with how to build the level and developing tools to assist with level design. One particular challenge was setting up the modular ground and metal/glass bridge pieces that can be deformed freely and smoothly. Initially I tried using baked skinned meshes but that proved to be unwieldy and rigging the different LOD levels to deform similarly was too time consuming. I ended up settling on integrating Megafiers 2 since it allowed for cleaner deformation, but it was still a lot of work to make it work the way I needed for baking multiple LOD meshes and a collision mesh for each object.

Another key challenge was combining mesh colliders for the simpler modular structures like the buildings, elevated track, skate park, lighthouse, and mini trials. These are comprised of separate prefabs with their own colliders which don’t always play nice with the physics. Sometimes when wall running or sliding on these surfaces the player could get stuck on the seams in between individual parts even though the surface appears perfectly smooth. Over the span of a few months I slowly built a tool that can remove interior faces of these collider groups as well as remove duplicate vertices. This means that one of the buildings made up of a bunch of blocky prefabs ends up with a single mesh collider containing only the outer surfaces of all combined colliders with all seams welded; no hard edges or interior geometry.

It currently depends on adjacent colliders having vertices in the same place since it isn’t capable of splitting triangle edges and it doesn’t merge co-planar triangles, but it’s adequate for the level design needs of Razorlocks. I may share the tool at some point since it’s solved a problem I’ve had with physics in Unity for a long time.

The rest of the levels should be quicker to build as a result of this work. Next I’m going to work on the visuals and polish of mini trials, and then polish up races a bit so I can put together a trailer and gameplay video for Steam.