Hi everyone,
Last week’s development was again very productive, though not necessarily on the parts I wanted to work on. Instead, I decided to add a bunch of animations that had so far been missing, which I will talk about a bit today.
As I started working on better combat control for the commander last week, I decided to first test the current state to see what needed doing most urgently. This made me realise something quite quickly: There were still a ton of animations missing from the combat. I had already mentioned the missing “aiming” animation last week, but ranged units didn’t have an animation for melee combat either; swordsmen were using the construction animation to strike (with a sword instead of a hammer, of course); and soldiers throwing a torch at a building was missing both the throwing and the torch.
This has of course been a consistent state of the development of this game. I feel a lot more comfortable with coding than I do with art, and so the art has been lagging behind quite consistently. This week, I decided that this needed to change. I had mentioned a few times now that I wanted to switch the melee and ranged combat to make things more predictable for players, but when players can't see what is happening cause animations are missing, it is difficult to make anything predictable with code alone.
So, this week I added some new animations. It had been years since I last animated anything, so it took me a little while to get the hang of it again, but in the end, I managed to add a torch throwing animation (see today’s image), I added a new gathering animation when villagers are getting bananas (this had also been using the construction animation, without a hammer), and I added some animations to the ranged soldiers. Ranged soldiers now kneel down as they are taking aim and tilt their head just before shooting - to make it much easier to see how close they are to firing. Ranged soldiers now also have a distinct melee combat animation, in which they strike with the stock of their gun.
For next week, I am intending to also change the swordsman's animation from the construction- to an actual attack animation, after which I will return to the code to add some more combat control.
Until next week!