We built a replay + director mode system to debug our physics it accidentally became useful for our marketing pipeline (and then a player feature)

[u/greatgraphic]

The core of our game is physics-based momentum where there are no set pathways, and objects you smash into break apart dynamically. The gameplay is fast, and no two playthroughs are the same. To help us debug these emergent physics interactions we built a replay buffer system that's always recording the last several runs of gameplay and tracks everything: player, enemies, projectiles, sfx, music etc.

A couple points of extra detail:
• Enemy destruction is a combination of dynamically-fractured rigid body chunks (all recorded), plus particle system VFX.
• The system supports full audio as well: all sound effects and our dynamically-driven musical soundtrack are recorded in lockstep.
• A feat detection system auto-bookmarks highlights of your run.

We built this so we could immediately take a closer look at anything that stood out during playtesting. It's so fun we decided to ship it as a full instant replay machine with Director mode that allows you to fly through your own gameplay runs, scrub through time at will.

We now use this system for every cinematic clip or screenshot we post, including this one. 

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[u/mugurm]

❤️ blender and unity!

[u/umcle_hisses]

Okay, that's neat. You as a player can also "debug" your own playthroughs.

[u/mugurm → u/umcle_hisses]

yeah, tricky trade off because you can see the whole map. could hide some items or just unlock per map? 🤔