Alright, so I spent some time today messing around with this idea I had about a tilting shield. You know, like in a game, when something hits a shield, instead of just sitting there, it kinda angles itself against the hit? Seemed like a neat little detail to try and figure out.
Getting Started
First thing, I just set up a super basic scene. Nothing fancy. Just needed something to represent the shield. I grabbed a simple flat rectangle, maybe like a basic plane or a flattened cube. That was gonna be my shield. Then I needed something to represent the ‘hit’. I decided to just use mouse clicks for testing, keeps things simple. Click somewhere, and that’s the ‘impact’ point.
Figuring Out the Tilt
Okay, so the core thing was: how to make the shield tilt away from the click? I needed to figure out the direction from the click point towards the center of the shield. Took a bit of thinking. Basically, find the spot I clicked, find the center of my shield object, and draw an imaginary line between them. That line tells me the direction of the ‘attack’.
Once I had that direction, I needed to rotate the shield. The idea was to make the front face of the shield point slightly away from that incoming direction. This part involved some fiddling. My first attempts were pretty clumsy. Sometimes the shield would spin way too fast, other times it would barely react.
Trial and Error – Lots of it
Seriously, getting the rotation right took the longest. Here’s roughly what I tried:
- Directly setting the angle: This was jerky. The shield would just snap to the new position. Looked bad.
- Trying to slowly turn it: Better, but then it felt sluggish, especially if I clicked rapidly in different spots.
- Mixing direction and ‘up’: Had to make sure the shield didn’t tilt weirdly, like upside down. Needed to keep track of which way was ‘up’ for the shield.
The main challenge was getting that direction vector and translating it into a rotation that felt kinda natural. Not too robotic, not too floppy. I played around with how much it should tilt too. A little tilt looks better than a huge ninety-degree turn, usually.
Getting Somewhere
After a bunch of tweaks, I got it working reasonably well. When I click near the shield, it figures out the direction and angles itself slightly away from the click point. If I click on the left, it tilts right. Click on the top, it tilts down a bit. It’s not super sophisticated, you know, no fancy physics or anything. But it does the basic thing!
It snaps back to a default position after a short delay too, which I added later because otherwise, it just stayed tilted after the first click. That felt unfinished.
End Result
So yeah, that was my little project for the day. Got a simple shield object that reacts to where you ‘hit’ it by tilting away. It’s a small detail, but it was fun to work through the steps: figuring out the hit direction, applying rotation, and smoothing it out. It’s satisfying to make these little interactive things work, even if they’re simple. Definitely learned by doing.