FMP - week 15 - Switch to the night loop

Anouk Dutrée
30 jan 2023
4 minuten om te lezen

So this week was Christmas week 🎅! Which means that I mainly dedicated time to family and I actually only had one full day to work on the project. Since we wrapped up the day loop last week, I could make a start with stuff for the night loop! I decided to focus on animations, as for animating I really need a solid block of time where I can focus on them, so having a full day at my disposal that seemed like a good idea. I created the following animations:

Swoop animation for forest swoop minigame
Flying eat animation for animal chase minigame
Tweaked the soaring animations: I added left tilt, right tilt and polished the wing flapping animations.
Fireball shooting animation for the castle attack
Firebreath perched animation for castle attack in case we want to use it
Dragon is hurt animation for the castle attack

Other than animations I also added some small options for tail customization of the dragon. I decided to pick that up at the same time as the animations as every mesh addition requires weight painting to work with the animations. So it saves me a lot of time to do the mesh additions before making any new animations as otherwise I just end up with double work.

And as a final task I also drafted a test survey to use with our day loop build. The survey structure was pretty standard and follows the advised format described Schell in The Definitive Guide to Playtest Questions (Schell 2017). I worked with that survey set up before in 720 and really liked the value of output his questions gave me, so I saw no reason to re-invent the wheel.

Animations

Okay let's talk animations! There were a lot of animations to get done, some more challenging than others. I started with the swoop animation as that would be the most tricky one. Some aspects of this I identified as being challenging:

I need to keep the animation without root-motion, as the character controller will do the actual swoop movement of the 3D model. This makes the animation a bit hard to visualize when you're making it.
The swoop will most likely be seen mostly from above as that is where the camera will be. Potentially we can change camera while swooping for a nice cutscene effect, but for now I need to make sure that the animation makes sense when viewed from above.
The animation will need to feel very responsive to the player so I will not have a lot of anticipation time to play with. As CG cookie also notes in their guide to FPS animations: gameplay comes first! Animations should fire directly when a user clicks a button for that action (cgcookie.com 2020).

I quickly accepted the first issue, as it will be something I have to fix once I can integrate the animations with Rob's game logic. So that's a problem for later. So to start tackling the other issue and get cracking I decided to look up a lot of example video footage from eagles swooping down on their prey. I found an amazing stock video on shutterstock which captured all the movements of the bird very well. I used this as my reference for the animation. I ended up with this as a first version:

After the swoop animation was done I continued with the flying eat animation and the fireball and firebreath. None of these were super difficult as I had already made a firbreath animation for the proposal and I could reause a lot of the keyframes from that. I essentially just tweaked the anticipation parts and the impact parts of the animations for different results. Below you can see the flying eat and the fireball animation.

With those done I could move on to polishing the soaring animations. I had already made simple soaring and flying animations for the proposal, but upon closer inspection I felt that they were too bland. So I added some more wing tip movements to simulate the wing vibrations due to wind currents

and turbulence. This looked better!

I also still needed to make some tilted soaring animations. When a player would turn to the left or right while flying the dragon would need to tilt their respective wing towards the ground to turn. There was nothing fancy needed for this as it's just a copy of the general soaring animation but tilted sideways by about 45 degrees, and then mirroring it for the other side. Once it's in-game I'll need to check if the tilt is pronounced enough to feel good.

Tail customization

As explained in the intro, I also worked on some basic tail customizations for the player. I kept it simple since our scope is just a vertical slice and customization can quickly become a rabbit hole! I used the same tactic as with the horns: I first created a base shape, and then modified this shape with various shapekeys to allow for quick and rather versatile customization. The shape I started with was a crescent moon, and I added shape keys for curvature and size. In the following gif you can see the resulting customization options.

In an ideal scenario there would of course be lots of different styles to play around with, but for the sake of time I decided to leave that out of scope. The scope of customization for the playable demo is a scope that suffices to show that there is customizability. Adding more options once a fundament is there is always easier than making an entirely new component customizable!