Greetings Everyone!
Howdy, over the past week we got a bunch of small fixes done! White this won’t be the most flashy dev log you’ve ever seen, a lot of these changes are important so we will do our best to explain them clearly!
GENERAL UPDATES
DODGING
The dodge ability was updated to allow each character to have their own dodge distance and duration. Before, we thought it would be great to have a single dodge ability, and have everyone be equal for distance and time.
So then it turns out that was a bad idea, because most of our characters are vastly different sizes. So, uh, let's change that.
Now each character can have their own distances for rolling while not locked on and dashing while locked on, regardless of whether it's a dash or a roll; you can customize the distance of the initial burst of speed for the dodge, and then the sliding to a stop that they do afterward.
JUMP COMPRESSION
We had a whole thing written two dev logs ago about how we fixed the jump compression that was really wonky and having people’s feet go through the floor anytime they landed, BUT it turns out what we thought was going to work, ended up making them do the opposite.
(Now their feet hover instead, which is slightly better, but we’re going to go back to the drawing board on this one.)
ANIMATION BLENDING
There was a small problem that we weren’t able to figure out for a while, where if you started or stopped walking, your character's legs would fly out in front of them for a split second.
This seemed really weird until we started looking into the jump compression stuff. Lo and behold, by default, the characters thought they were always sprinting. So anytime we start or stop walking when they’re trying to figure out if they should blend into their idle animation, they start sprinting for a moment.
It's not a huge bug, but it is one that did have us stumped for a while.
ORIENTATION BLENDING
When you lock on to an enemy, your character plays new locomotion sets for walks and jogs. Typically, we just had to make Forward, Left, Right, and Back. The animation system would blend these together to let you walk in the in-betweens, so diagonally in any direction.
The animations ended up not being able to blend very well if you switched your overall direction from forward to backwards. This would only happen if you’re walking forwards-right/left and switch to backwards-right/left. Going from forwards straight to backwards was fine. It's mainly visible if you’re locked on and moving around an enemy. As we should do, because the enemies are tall and imposing.
(When you’re walking left and right and then moving forwards and backward, you now have a new animation to blend with. It's not perfect, but it looks a lot better than before)
So the solution here was to add two more animations (two for walking and two for jogging), that are front-facing. The standard Left and Right animations basically assumed that you were walking backwards before, so that made it impossible to blend nicely from the front.
It's more animations for each character, but it does help them look a bit less jarring when changing directions.
SHOLD UPDATES
Shold got a new IK Rig that let us begin porting over all of his old animations from the UE4 version of the game. This gets us 90% of the way with his animations, except that it didn’t quite fix up everything it should have.
This means we get to go ahead and fix this manually for 290 animations. Yay.
FIA UPDATES
MODEL UPDATES
Fia had some skinning issues where her shirt was clipping through the decorative neck brace, and the brace wasn’t staying intact when her head moved.
That was stopping us from moving her head and neck at all during any animation, so it was a good time to fix it.
Added in Fia’s dagger as well, so she can stop using the default ritual dagger.
Completely ignoring the fact that we like to oversize all weapons, it's important for weapons to be a bit longer than you’d typically expect to make sure they actually have a chance to hit the enemies.
Even the hitboxes for them are oversized to an extent, so make sure that they hit when you expect them to, instead of missing by an inch or two and feeling like you got cheated.
ANIMATION UPDATES
Oh baby, we finally have some custom animations for Fia. Started things off with new locomotion animations for walks, jogs, sprints, jumps, and turns in place. She finally animates differently than the initiate.
(Behold, she no longer slouches like that bandaged weirdo
In addition, we got her melee attacks finished as well. Typically, characters have somewhere between 3-4 attacks for their melee combo, but Fia is all about attacking as much as she can to lower the cast time on her spells. More hits = faster spell casts, so, uh, I gave her 11 attacks.
(The more you flip your knife, the deadlier you are)
The Initiate has 4 attacks, Dawksin has 7, and now Fia has the most. Still might need to play around with this number, and possibly the timings, but it feels pretty good at the moment.
Look, the important thing here is that we got excited about making attacks, and they’re already done. Relax.
Also, since she’s meant to be really flashy in combat, she does knife flips all the time. This was actually a bit challenging since each animation had to know the orientation of the knife from the previous one, but we think it came out pretty neat, and it helped sell her persona.
We still need to work on her heavy attacks and such, but that should be done pretty quickly.
See ya’ll next week.