Prototype Week 2 - Iron Brawlers
It's week two of developing Iron Brawlers and we are midway through the prototype phase. Josh has made some awesome headway programming, getting the camera working, player collisions, and lives in the game. Christa has made great progress on a female base-mesh and Dante's main character is looking super unique and cool.
While my focus is going to be largely animating the characters for this game, I think it’s also important that I implement those animations in-engine, so this week, I’ve been working on getting a prototype version of the player character in the game using a rigged and animated model from Mixamo.com.
Mixamo is an awesome tool for prototyping, making it super fast to get animated characters in your games. It's awesome to get a sense of how the mechanics are playing out with a fully working character.
Mixamo is an awesome tool for prototyping, making it super fast to get animated characters in your games. It's awesome to get a sense of how the mechanics are playing out with a fully working character.
I started by hooking up a running animation. Once the transitions in and out of idle were feeling good in the animator, I added a jump and a punch. Once each action felt good I'd move on to adding another.
The major thing I learned this week was that using Unity Mechanim’s transitions wouldn’t work for a lot of the animations in our game. Animations for Iron Brawlers need to be snappy; they need to feel like they play immediately on button press giving the player instant feedback (as discussed in last week's post). Transitions in the animator add input delay which just feels terrible. This was especially apparent when I moved on to building a 3-hit combo. Using the animator's built-in transitions, the attacks felt sluggish and delayed. So instead I needed to play the animations programmatically.
My knowledge of C# is pretty rudimentary, so it’s been good to learn how to run these animations purely through code, rather than leaning on the animator. It’s also a good lesson to learn now before I start animating. I will need to make sure that the start and end frames of my animations lead nicely into the next. I already do this, but it’s good to know that I can’t rely on Unity interpolating and fixing weak transitions.
At this stage, we’ve got a jump, jab, 3-hit combo, and a leg sweep working. Josh is hard at work getting the interactions between player hitboxes and hurt boxes working for each attack type, Christa is building hands for her base mesh in Maya, and Dante is doing his thing, painting an awesome looking main character. This week we aim to have our prototype finished, proving that we have what it takes to make this game. I'm going to be grey-boxing our UI and adding some other attacks (an aerial, perhaps?). So with that said, I'd better get back to work.
My knowledge of C# is pretty rudimentary, so it’s been good to learn how to run these animations purely through code, rather than leaning on the animator. It’s also a good lesson to learn now before I start animating. I will need to make sure that the start and end frames of my animations lead nicely into the next. I already do this, but it’s good to know that I can’t rely on Unity interpolating and fixing weak transitions.
At this stage, we’ve got a jump, jab, 3-hit combo, and a leg sweep working. Josh is hard at work getting the interactions between player hitboxes and hurt boxes working for each attack type, Christa is building hands for her base mesh in Maya, and Dante is doing his thing, painting an awesome looking main character. This week we aim to have our prototype finished, proving that we have what it takes to make this game. I'm going to be grey-boxing our UI and adding some other attacks (an aerial, perhaps?). So with that said, I'd better get back to work.