The great guys over at Unity recently posted a Car Tutorial, complete with racetrack and lots of options to tweak.  I haven’t been happy with the physics of our car yet, so I started going through it to see how they did what they did… I got a bit sidetracked.  I woke up yesterday just before 5am and had an idea about hitting the clown with a big hammer… why not, right?

So I spent all of yesterday and most of today and got that working, as well as our car model in their racetrack scenario (using that environment as a testbed) and had Chris (our graphics guru) come up with a hammer… and here are the results.  Now, instead of just driving your car straight at Sparky the Road Clown, you can choose to drive past him and try your luck at whacking him with a big hammer that’s mounted to your car instead.

I took out all the extraneous scenery and textures from the environment so as not to confuse anyone — our stuff is the brightly colored textured car and hammer.

The hammer, once you acquire it, spins around on top of your car like a helicopter blade.  It takes some timing and some luck to get him just right — in this case, the big ball is what would be Sparky (or Sparky’s head, perhaps).  But when you get it lined up.. the payoff is fantastic.

Some people might call the first one a near miss.  I think George Carlin was right that this would be a near collision — a collision would be a near miss.

What you see in the second one is about to be a “near miss” as in, “look, he nearly missed… but not quite!” — did I mention that it’s in slow motion, Matrix style when the moment of truth arrives and it’s time for Hammer to meet Clown?  I’m probably as excited about this one feature as I am about the whole game.  I think people are really going to enjoy it.

Oh, and don’t think you’re going to be the only one with a giant hammer… but we’ll leave that for later.

And we’ve set a release date.  On June 25th, one month from today, we’ll be sending this off to Apple and releasing it on Facebook.