This week was all about animating. First, I took an evening to revise the jump animation – I believe I mentioned this before, but while the old jump animation looked pretty decent, it communicated the dimensions of the character poorly to the player. That is to say, it made it appear as though she was trying to touch down to the ground a full stride ahead of where the collision box was actually testing. I changed it so the foot reaching for the ground is pointed straight down and pretty much lined up with the true landing zone. Here’s what it looks like now:
I tested it out in-game and while it may not look quite as nice it’s much less likely to frustrate the player.
After doing that, I started in on the air attack animation. This is distinct from the rising and downwards attack animations, which I had previously been planning to be the only air attacks, but which, in testing, felt unnatural as the only choices. So, apparently this game will have special attacks. I’m actually considering adding a downwards kick as well, but nothing after that. Probably.
Anyway, the tricky part of an air attack, as I have mentioned in a previous DevBlog, is making the motion look like it follows through, hopefully while still not committing the player to some outlandish action. I decided to go with a twisting attack, partially to account for that and partially because I thought it would look awesome as hell. I think it turned out pretty good.
I was worried that it would look too much like a special two-directional attack as I worked on it, but it seems relatively straightforward. Though the animation is complete and hooked into the game, the melee attack behavior needs to be revised to enable it, so this is all, of course, pending testing. I hope it works well, because honestly I worked pretty hard on this one.
Not much else to say about this week. Honestly, it was another kind of not-great week in terms of productivity, mostly just due to a couple of pretty crappy days. I’m going to have to try to re-focus towards next week and have a real plan of action. So, what needs to get done next? First, of course, getting this animation in-game and tested. Probably the next most pressing tasks are getting melee collision implemented and creating an entity editor. If those tasks seem too big to manage, well, there’s a bunch of little improvements to be done, reviewing the animations and tweaking any that need improvement or spending some more quality time with the animation code trying to finish it off once and for all. It’s enough to fill my plate for the coming week – though I may have to dedicate some time, as well, to building a detailed list of tasks to address over the coming weeks.
It blows my mind how much there is yet to be done. This is such a huge task. There’s no way to make it smaller, though, except to get to work. So: To work I go.