Hey I was wondering if you could explain to me in theory how you made the world curved and had the blocks curve with them? It doesnt look like its just a rotation, but some kind of filter or something, but then I cant imagine how you would get the collision to work that way. Im really curious! Thanks!
I can't speak for the devs personally, but this is customarily done with a vertex shader, as explained in this video (just a random google result, I'm not affiliated with this guy in any way)
The short version is that the world probably isn't curved (since, as you pointed out, collision would be more complicated and costly) but rather the shader bends your perception of the world like a funhouse mirror. Hope that helps!
Hi! The collision and physics is all done in an invisible flat 2d world (like the original mario). The actual tiles and sprites are then wrapped onto a circle -- it could be done in a vertex shader but we just do that transformation on the cpu. The tiles need to be deformed otherwise there are gaps.