Post 88 - Light Attacks & Dancing

Post 88

Today Justin came by and helped me, help Ian with learning some code. Then Mr Bilesky wanted us to show a grade 9 student what we have done with our game so far. So Justin, Ian and I spent some time showing David all our blogs and explaining to him what he has to do to be an independent student. After around 35 minutes David left to work on his own stuff, and I started to play around with my animations again.

I started by changing up the player light attack so he doesn't swing so close to the ground. This makes it look less powerful and more like a quick small attack.
But the majority of my time went into talking with David about what he can do, and what he wants to do as a new independent student. 

    

Then within the last minutes of class Justin requested something a little less serious. A dancing animation. Next class I will be doing some more serious animations like the heavy attack or a Running animation for the player.

Post 87 - Already Making Mistakes

Post 87

Mistakes

My plan for today was to finish up the "Lifter" enemy. But last night I had some free time and did some major work on it. Now this isn't exactly a problem. But. I didn't have enough time this morning to upload my progress to my Dropbox, so if I worked on it now, I would be doing the same thing I did last night. And I would do the bone structure of the "Lifter" but because of the new sprites I changed last night it has a different size and dimension, so when I actually switch to my new sprites it wouldn't fit.
Now I need to find something else to do.

I think I will work on improving the basic attack animation for the player, and making a new attack animation for his heavy attack.

Attacks

I started by looking at the light attack, and did some very, very minor changes which don't really effect too much, so they aren't going to be getting a spotlight in this post. However I did some major changes to the heavy attack. I started by deleting the old version where he does a two handed over head strike. As shown by the GIF.
I then started to use the Light Attack Animation as a sort of template for my new Attack.
What i'm wanting from this heavy attack is something that looks the same as the light attack right up until its too late, for the enemy that is.

Ninja Skills?

Currently this animation is in a experimental phase.
Right now the character swings his blade backwards to bash the enemy with the reinforced spike side. Honestly not the most practical attack, but whatever, its a video game. But the attack seems too fast and too fluid, it looks less like a heavy attack and more like the main character is a trained Ninja from an over the top Hollywood movie. So next class I will be redoing this completely.
But what I was aiming for is like somewhere between a bash attack and an upper cut, but with a machete.

Post 86 - More Animations, And A New Enemy?

POST 86

More Animations

Recently I went back and changed the default Idle animation for the Dragger. 

(The Zombie in our game)

Previously I was doing hand drawn animations, frame by frame. But then we discovered a new way to create animations. The way the new system works is like Pivot, but with more complicated images, bones and lots of other little settings and stuff that nobody really cares about.

So back to the changes with the Idle Animation. 

I took the old animation, changed the way he was standing ever so slightly and gave him some little hand twitchy-ness. This makes the animation look a little more alive then it was in its previous state.

New Enemy

I also started to develop a new enemy type, the "heavy" so to speak. This enemy is what I will be setting up next class. The character itself is still very unfinished. The skeleton mesh in this picture is practically a carbon copy of the normal Dragger, which doesn't really fit well. Because of the big size difference, so I will work on setting up a new skeleton for the "Lifter" as Justin calls it. 

Tomorrow I will set up my first animations for the "Lifter". Along with his proper Bone structure.