Devlog 7

Greetings readers, Lucy here. I'm pleased to announce that we have managed to implement a bunch of new weapons this week, making the game much more interesting! You may download the latest build to check it out for yourself. The programmers are now going to focus on incorporating the final assets into the game and make the game even more fun.

With our current framework, we were able to quickly implement weapons in record times. we implemented the banana boomerang, Lemon Bomb, Corn Gun and the Coconut Ball. Fortunately, they are  inside the game as we have obtained the assets for them.

The other programmer also implemented a new and improved main menu with amazing looking assets. He also managed to add in some nice countdown animations between rounds, score screen and victory screen.

However the biggest improvement has to be our main character, Commisioner Potato, he now has some lovely skins, turning him into Detective Spud, Chief Tator Tots and Officer Pommes. Furthermore he also gained some amazing looking running animations, for both front, back, right and left. 



On top of this we have a new fully realised level, but I will let the artists speak about that!

Animation - Commissioner Potato got some moves

Its about time we start implementing some movement to our character.  With the rig implemented we stated with the main movement set of the character, making him walk forward. However we quickly started to know some now issues wen we started to squash and stretch the characters, plus one of the characters toes was not following along. After fixing some issues, the animation could finally begin. That wasn’t the only issue that we encountered, the biggest problem was after we start fixing stuff on the mesh on the rig, the piece disappeared when importing, even tho everything worked fine in maya. Searching for the solution we noticed that by adding faces, the mesh is registered as a change in Unreal and does not recognize it anymore,   so all we got was a walking tie with hat, hair, and sunglasses. So for now the workaround is recouple the animation to the existing mesh that is inside unreal already. That were the main issues we had when implementing animation.

We had to create the four base movement direction first. These are walking forward, backward, staving left and right. After that we can worry about the other animations sets like dashing, dying, idle…. Each set is a stationary loop of 60 frames on a 30fr/s framerate. This is common for video and animation (normally 24frs/25frs) but games do have a higher framerate. Because of this when we implemented the character, he’s walking very Slooo-mooo.. so in the game-engine we have to speed the animation up so everything would feel normal again.

To make the character believable in the environment, we implemented a bit of squash and stretch to make the character feel chunckie and shifting his weight around. Some movement might still be felt jankie, but for now I wanted to add as much of the character movement into the game, so I can worry about the key cleaning more in the polishing fase.  Overall Im pretty happy whit the result im having now.

If I were to change, or learn something from the experience is to add a few more bones to the mesh. What I felt lacking was the opportunity to bend the toes, to have more a natural feel to the walk and maybe an extra bone on top of the head to create even more squash and stretch to give that cartoony feeling.