Third Person Shooter Development Update 4: Continued Animation

I was sick today, so I decided to continue animating from home. Got a couple of animations done and I'm trying to get some melee attack animations looking right, but I'm having issues making it look good enough.

The animations shown below will be faster in game, I just need to adjust their play rate in Unreal Engine. It's easier for me to do that rather than accommodate animation speed with frames in Maya. So I can keep the frames that make the animation smooth but I can still make the animation faster like I want it.

Double Jump Falling Loop

Strike Style Moving

Strike Style Dashing

Haste Style Aerial Dive

Haste Style Spin Attack

Third Person Shooter Development Update 3: Animation

A quick update on animation, I'm working on it but I've had a couple of problems this time, rig problems, model problems and general annoyances with Unreal Engine that are halting progress. But it's been sorted now and I'm now animating the character and putting the animations in engine.

Here are a couple of animations I've done so far.

Idle Animation

The first running animation I did, not happy with it at all though, I decided to try and do it again.

Running Animation (Still not happy with it, it's better than the last one at least, if I find some spare time I'll redo it)

Single Jump Animation

Single Jump Loop Falling Animation

Double Jump Animation

I'm going to carry on animating at home, I can't animate in the studio due to the software on the computers not being updated. While I'm in the studio I'm going to start properly designing the first level of the game. On paper and in unreal engine. That play-test will come soon I swear ;)

Third Person Shooter Development Update 2: Mechanics, Pause Menu and Preparing for Animation

An update on my current progress, my main focus right now has been to get everything working mechanically in game alongside modelling and rigging a playable character. The quicker I get this done the quicker a playtest can go out. I'm hoping to get the first playtest out by either Wednesday or Friday. But anyway what's been done?

Haste Style & Strike Style Movement & Mechanics

Firstly I started to work on how I think the game should play and how I want the player character to move around the game's environment.

Haste Style

Haste Style & Strike Style have movement speed differences, Haste Style you move a lot quicker and if you hold down the right trigger on a controller you can sprint and move even quicker.

While in Haste Style you can jump and double jump. If you press the B button in mid air you will slam towards the ground, which will be used to break objects and as an attack.

This straight lunge forward will be a mid air punch that will knock enemies away. It will also be used to smash through breakable walls. If you use this move on the ground it will instead be a short ranged punch which you can combo into a 2nd and 3rd punch.

Holding down the left trigger in midair will activate the characters hover boots.

Strike Style

Holding down the right trigger during Strike Style will cause the player to shoot with their weapon, right now this is shown in game as a line trace.

Some target practice to check hit events. When a bullet hits an enemy they will take damage until eventually being defeated

AI

Not dabbled in AI before so as a start I've got some simple AI behavior patterns working that can be used for some enemies.

Chase AI is a pawn that attempts to follow the player wherever they go.

Patrolling AI goes from one target point to another. I can freely customise where the target points are and how many of them there are. In the example above there are only two target points, however I can add more to allow the pawn to patrol a larger area.

I forgot to record footage of it (you can see it in the background of the chase AI GIF) but I also made a random location AI where they randomly move to a spot every 2 seconds within a large area.

Pause Menu

I also added a pause menu to the game that will show certain game stats as well as provide the player with other options such as viewing the level map, checking their equipment, checking item info and quitting the game.

Pause Menu Mockup in Photoshop

Pause Menu in-game

HUD

Lastly I did some HUD work involving getting a working health and armor bar along with the strike style crosshair and the currency counter.

Modelling the Player Character & His Weapon

Along with the unreal engine work I have finished modelling what the player character will look like. He's ready to be rigged and animated.

Here is the gunblade weapon that he will use. 

 And that's everything, now I've got to rig and animate the character, put his animations in game and get the game ready for a quick playtest.

Unreal Engine 4 Winter Game Jam 2018 - Cooly's Funky Ride

Just a quick update about what I'm doing right now, my uni work is coming along nicely, I'll have some updates to show soon. However, I recently took part in my first solo game jam that went on from 8th February - 11th February.

I've been wanting to start doing regular game jams for a long time, so I finally caved in and decided to do one. The jam I took part in was the unreal engine winter game jam 2018, where I worked solo to create a game to the given theme "On thin ice". In the end I made a game called "Cooly's Funky Ride"

Cooly's Funky Ride is a short auto runner focused on precise jumps and player decision making. The goal is to reach the portal at the end of the course whilst picking up collectibles along the way to increase your score.

For this project I animated a character again, character animation seems to be something I want to get good at, so the game jam was the perfect opportunity to test how quickly I could model, rig and animate a character.

I'm quite proud of the outcome, the game can be played to completion, there are a bunch of animations to give the character a bit of personality and people that have managed to play the game say that it is addictively challenging and fun.

I'll definitely be doing more game jams in the near future, but right now I'm going to pass out and try and sort out my sleeping pattern. Throughout the 3 days I only got about 10 hours sleep so I'm gonna hibernate now.

Here's a link to the game download, so you can play it if you want:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fb68uubrro2blyc/AABM7_icbXM6B7AVzEbP813ia?dl=0

And here is a link to a play-through of the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff0xNnvpNUM