Third Person Shooter Update 5: Getting Sick of Animating

As the title implies, animating is annoying me now. It's taking too long so some of the animations I have done today are pretty bad. I've probably half assed them because I'm getting frustrated/bored with it. Not only that but getting the aim offset to work properly is proving difficult too. An aim offset is where the character blends between 9 different aiming poses so they move and aim their weapon smoothly dependent on where the crosshair position is on screen.

Aim Offset Example

My Current Attempt

Anyway I've done about 7 animations today including:

Aiming Idle
Ground Slam
Ground Slam Recovery
Forwards Dodge Shot
Backwards Dodge Shot
Sideways Dodge Shot (both left and right)

I'm going to take a break from animation work and go back into it later with a better mindset. In the meantime I'm going to work more on game mechanics and level design, two things I enjoy.

I did a couple of things in engine that I haven't shown in an update yet so here they are.

First we have some armor pickups of varying sizes. Simply walking into one of these will fill up your armor meter.

Then we have health pickups, same again, of varying sizes. Picking up these will refill your health.

Gaia as explained in a previous post will be the game's currency. Gaia will be found in treasure chests and from defeating enemies. I used the shooting range targets as test enemies and got them to dispense Gaia when they are destroyed. The Gaia will automatically be pulled towards the player and they will collect it on contact. There are 3 different values of Gaia. All represented by different colours for small, medium and large values.

And lastly I've mainly been implementing animations to their in game mechanics. Some of these are proving difficult to get working correctly, especially the aiming offset.

Plan of Action

Start designing the first proper level of the game. The current area I've been using is only a test area. I'll accompany the level design with annotations, screenshots, and maybe quick drawings.