Have you ever wanted to travel to an active volcano and stand over the peak in a floating platform where temperatures can reach 750 °F just hovering over the peak? Yes? I thought so! So without further ado, here's your chance!

Introducing the finished minigame: Volcano Drop!
Our first 1v3 minigame which I spoke about in last week's devlog, but that was only at the beginning of development. Here's a preview and what you can expect from playing this wonderful minigame on a hot summer day:

One player at random is chosen as the cannoneer, while the other three players are set to runners. The Cannoneer's job is to knock out the runners before time runs out, whether it be hitting them with the bomb or destroying enough tiles that the runners have nowhere to run to.

Lets talk a bit about the most interesting part about how this game works, and how I feel that I did another game developer trick to get the game working great. As you can guess, there is a navmesh that goes over the tiles so the AI can pathfind to their new location. This is fine, until you think about the cannoneer, that is represented by a crosshair pawn. The cannoneer is supposed to sell you on the illusion that there is someone with a cannon in an area disjointed to the tiles, and is only aiming down at them. This means that the cannoneer should be able to go over the gaps in the tiles to reach their destination. But with the current setup, because the navmesh gets destroyed on each tile gap, I introduced a simple, yet very useful, trick:

 


An entirely new navmesh, very high above the tiles! This allows for the cannoneer to move freely between the tiles, over the gaps, and backflip 360° no scope the runners as he wishes.

Thanks for tuning in, see you next time!
- Marcos "El Macho" Camacho