Development Update #26

For November I continued the work on the remaining animations for the new enemies and Solarsplace continued working on the AI code.

Code

We found a few little quirks in the code that were cleaned up like enemies that shoot ranged projectiles like energy/fire balls just always target you no matter their facing direction, they now follow a linear target from their origin of creation.

This will make the game a bit easier on its own, to avoid the projectiles, so I'll make a pass to make them a bit faster, so it's over all the same but fairer to the player.

A bug was found that, I *cough* introduced when improving the hit feedback on the enemies with the Pain animations(simple reaction animations that played on any damage). This bug basically overwrote the stagger animation, so it kinda played a few frames of stagger, then the pain animation. I have fixed it locally and it'll go out in a patch soon.

Stagger is basically a state for the AI when they have received significant damage, it interrupts almost any other state, giving the player a bit of combat relief.

Animation

This month was challenging for me initially, I spent about 1.5 weeks trying to make the motion capture work for what I wanted, and in the end I eventually nailed a good process from the motion capture performance data (lost so many calories moving about) to in game animations on the enemies.

Here I am capturing idle poses for the Toahuggoa's (Giant Toad) animations.

The thought process was to have better quality, and more movement on the enemy, I wanted enemies to stagger in to physics objects and so on, but still take about the same time to create, which is always hard to do.

To do this I made a generic character in Blender where I imported all the motion capture performances and cleaned up all the key frames (motion capture data based on the quality of the suit/cameras can provide decent data but can be full of noise and oddities).

Over the course of another 1.5 weeks I went through about 150 mocap animations of deaths, staggers, stuns, melee attacks, etc and made it so it was a template that I could then easily import on to another bi-pedal enemy type, this wouldn't really work on things like Nub-Yeg for example.

When I started work on the Bile-Human I hand made a few animations like the walk cycle, and imported the needed mocap animations. It was pretty fast to put together 35 animations, they still needed some adjustment like foot and arm positions and so on.

Here is the master file with currently 190 animations that can be used and adjusted easily on any bi-pedal character.

This last week or so I worked on the Legion Knight, Bile-Human, and started the Flameborn Knight's animations.

Here is the Bile Human, a fairly week but deadly addition. Once it takes enough damage it'll start releasing toxic gas and explode.

Can be utilized against other enemies as well.

The Legion Knight is a very defensive archetype. Out in the open it's not too hard to bait out an attack and strafe around to get an easy kill. But, in a tight spot, can be very tricky to deal with so you're gonna need to figure out some tactics.

The Legion Knight is also hard to stagger, but very vulnerable to stuns, with a long recovery time.