TheGatewayOfRealities

More locomotion animations

Added 2018-04-23 05:42:28 +0000 UTC

Almost all ground locomotion animations are complete, from walk to run cycles, turns in place, stopping, jumping, falling.

These build up the core of the most frequently seen animations by the players, that's why I took some time making them look decent. They are not perfect yet, and in fact there is a lot of improvements to be had, but for now they do their job - it is always possible to revisit and improve them later, once next demo is out.

Aside from just animations, we added a charge up jump mechanic, which allows holding down the space bar to prepare for the jump, and then release to make your character leap further up.

There is no jump-charge while moving, because it is important to make jump instant - as soon as the player presses the jump button. However, under the hood it is a bit more complicated than that, the action does some clever input filtering, such as, for example, when you press jump just before landing - character will jump up automatically as soon as they can. Little things like that make games feel much more responsible and fun to control.

And of course there is the side step and backwards walking when in combat mode.

Overall, comparing to the test character iteration, the whole animation system got much more optimized, cleaner, and simpler. It achieves more using less individual animations, and that's a huge time saver.

That's all for now, but stay tuned for climbing and swimming animations, as well as special actions for shooting, using items, and interacting with environment!