CIRCULATION: Lost in a Dark Mechanical Labyrinth

@jwatte Hey, thank you. You may be right. It might be more interesting to watch it as a video with narration and the working process.

I was thinking you can build more awareness of your game that way! (If that’s what you’re going for)

1 Like

I have a channel but only shared some shorts about the game (not working very well). Also some random projects and couple tutorials I made recently sharing some basic stuff I learned while building the game and thought it might be good to share with others. But I could try a devlog, why not :slight_smile:
Would you personaly be more interested in the design process or the technical aspect?

I follow a few devlog type accounts, because it’s interesting to see how different people think about development.
If you have a channel, I’ll give it a look.

Here you go. :grin: Here is a video about the game in its early phase. However it became something completely different at this point.

1 Like

Creating destructible Blockers.

The idea here was to create objects that can be destroyed by the player.
Those objects have mainly two purposes:

  1. Block openings in the platform railing or the pipe pathways.
  2. Block mechanics use.
1 Like

As far as technical setup, it wasn’t too difficult because I just reused the logic from the breakable pots I created earlier. But I had to come up with a new design. The thought process was something like this: Why and how can something block a pathway or a machine from rotating? And on one or two occasions, it can be a technical defect, rust, or something that fell over. But how could it be a more logical and consistent occurrence.

It had to be something that grows around or onto different things. The first idea was roots, but obviously, you can’t break them. Then I tried out a crystal shape, but it was too generic. It needed to be something organic that grows irregularly like mold, corals, or a fungus. Then I made a couple of experiments with organic shapes and metaballs, geometry nodes, and particle spawning for randomization in Blender.




1 Like

I finally settled on a form that I like. But there was another issue. Although barely noticeable in-game, the geometry was very messy and had some shading problems.


Although I didn’t notice any performance issues, I decided to make the mesh cleaner and with less geometry, mostly as a personal challenge. I rebuilt the form from simple spheres and merged them one at a time. Cleaning the geometry was very tedious and time-consuming, but I am satisfied with the result. (The unwrapping was a challenge in itself.)




1 Like

I think it still could be better, but for a somewhat complex organic shape like this, it looks good enough.

1 Like

It turned out the most efficient and accurate way to unwrap it was to create a continuous seam that goes from hole to hole through the whole object. And in the end, it’s just 2 islands, inside and outside.


1 Like

Here is the material I use. It’s an instanced version of the material I use for the platforms. It has a couple of ‘gradient’ parameters. The dark blue mold always appears on top, independent of the mesh’s rotation or position.


1 Like

The first Devlog video for Circulation.

Enhancing the breaking event with particles.
Nothing fancy, just used some presets and changed the materials.


However the litte stones are just sprites with added colision , and the Sub UV Animation randomly cycles through them. Made them in blender with geometry nodes and rendered them out.

Here is a simple set up you can do to replicate that.

  1. slightly squashed quadsphere
  2. Geometry node setup
    Use the “W” value in Voronoi Texture node for form variation



After the chaos destruction happens, there need to be a way to smootly get rid of the broken pieces. The best solution I found was a material fadeout through dithering.




For your material, just include this nodes to the Opacity Mask. (must be masked material)

And for the blueprints, here is my setup, using a timeline from value 1 to 0.