One of the most fun parts of creating Deadvale has been implementing water physics. I've just uploaded a short demo of water physics in the game so far, Deadvale v0.2.0.30 Water Physics Demo.

Water physics is a feature I'd like to see heavily used in the final game for things like travel, puzzles, etc, and one of the primary reasons for the use of physics in the game in general. I take great inspiration from Half-Life 2, which made fantastic use of water physics, and I'd like to bring some of its style of gameplay to the fantasy RPG setting of Deadvale. My hope is that incorporating physics into the game in terms of various puzzles - roadblocks - and travel - will help draw the player's attention away from the fact that they do not have an inventory - a system that most RPGs rely heavily on to keep players interested - and one that I've made it my mission to try and avoid in Deadvale. Part of the fun of this project is trying to come up with ways to make an RPG fun without giving the player an inventory or things to loot. Equipment durability was originally one way I thought of to avoid inventory, but most players I've heard from hate it (and rightly so). Likely it will be reworked - either removed or equipment will have much higher durability values later. It is interesting how, psychologically, it doesn't feel bad to run out of limited ammo in a FPS setting, but having your weapon break mid-fight is not fun at all.

Mind control, water physics - these are all features I hope will provide a substitute for inventory that is fun and engaging, similar to how FPS games don't really rely much on loot/inventory.

The floating raft or boat is one of my favorite features so far. I experimented with this in Rise of the Primals II Demo, which has a large outdoor zone segmented by a river delta, which can only be navigated by making use of a floating raft. I'd envision something similar for Deadvale's outdoor levels - a sprawling wilderness, with many rivers and lakes only accessible for those willing to step on a raft.

Water physics has also been one of the more challenging features to implement. I created a multiplayer version of the floating raft (which is itself effectively just a moving platform) in Rise of the Primals II Demo, and as I use Unity's built-in Character Controller class for moving the Player and other Characters, this was quite a challenge to implement. The Character Controller cannot be practically set as a child of any moving object, and I am not a fan of Rigidbody-based character control which would fix this issue - it feels clunky and unresponsive. For all its flaws, the built-in Character Controller does handle pretty well. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to avoid using a "ghost child" solution as in Rise of the Primals II, where a separate ghost object associated with the controller is set as a child of the platform, and the controller bases its movement upon the ghost object. But in the end kept the ghost solution, it works well and doesn't cause any major performance issues.

Some very crazy, unpredictable things can happen with physics, which can make game design hard, but also it doesn't hurt to have wacky stuff happen from time to time.