2.5D Sidescroller Update 9: Animations Implemented - Build 3 Ready!

All of the necessary animations needed for build 3 are now complete. From my last post I did 4 other animations that were missing, being turning on the spot, air dodging, wall sliding and wall jumping.

Turning

Wall Slide

Wall Jump

Air Dodge

Build 3 contains the same test area as build 1 and 2 with minor adjustments and bug fixes. Animations have been attached to the player character. The build has been sent out to multiple playtesters.

While I'm waiting for feedback for build 3 I have made a start to designing the first level of the game. The game will begin with the main character leaving her house to investigate a nearby crash site of a shooting star. Level design plans have been written and drawn on paper, once it is complete I will take pictures of them and include them in a level design blog update.

I have also modelled a couple of assets I will need to decorate the first level, alongside some gameplay assets such as food items that will be used to replenish the players health.

Very early in game mock up of how the level will begin. The player will begin by emerging from their house and take control from there. If they backtrack on themselves though you will actually be able to enter the house.

Current Tasks

• Finish the level design on paper

• Blueprint and model more assets that I will need for the game, such as a 3D tile set for building the level with, level decorations and gameplay assets such as hazards, levers, collectibles etc.

2.5D Sidescroller Update 8: Animation Dump 1

Another animation update! Rather than update the blog with work I do every day I'll just wait until I do a hefty amount and then dump them all into big posts. So this will be my first animation dump, these animations are mainly aerial animations, alongside some grounded animations I forgot about.

Crouch from stand (Reverse animation when going from crouch to stand)

Crouch Idle

Run Skid

Turn - While Running

Now I don't know why I tried to GIF this one, it's a 5 frame animation of a "jumpsquat" and converting to a gif has made it look funny. (Looks like she is dancing) My thought process was, rather than have the player jump into the air right away I thought it might be a good idea to show smoother animation by seeing the character push themselves from the ground before a jump. This could be good, but depending on how it is set up in engine it might sacrifice control responsiveness by having an extremely short delay before actually jumping into the air (extremely short being barely noticeable) but it's still a possible risk. I might try it and play test how it looks and feels. If it's naff I can always throw it out.

Jumping Forward (The First Attempt) something didn't look right so I retried this animation and changed the arm movements slightly)

Jumping Forward (Second Attempt)

Jumping Backward

Fall - Regular

Fall - Regular (Second Attempt, didn't like this one. Not getting used)

Fall Forwards

Fall Backwards

Double Jump Forward

Double Jump Backward

Fall Neutral - After Double Jump

Fall Forwards - After Double Jump

Fall Backwards - After Double Jump

I still have to do an air dodge animation and a wall jump animation. After that I THINK I've got all the animations I need for the next build of the game. After I have those last two it's onto the process of hooking up the animations to my character in unreal engine.

2.5D Sidescroller Update 7: Walk/Running Animations

Walk and running animations were done today. There were a couple of issues that popped up with me still being new to animating in Maya but I'm gradually getting better so progress is progress.

(Unfortunately the gifs have a lower frame rate due to video > gif conversion so the animations may look choppy. In Maya the animations run a lot better than how they seem to be running in the gifs)

Walk - Slow
When the player isn't dashing the character will instead "walk" at a certain pace dependent on how far they push the analog stick. Walking has 3 different animations that the character will blend between as they pick up and lose speed.

Walk - Medium

Walk - Fast
Speed needs adjusting on this one, needs to be slower, luckily I can decrease the play rate of the animation in unreal engine. Handy!

Running
When the player holds the dash button the player will be considered to be "running" and will blend into this animation. Again the play rate of this animation also needs tweaking to play a lot faster. I had trouble with the running animation the most as I couldn't get good poses while she was running. So I decided to make her do the "Sonic the Hedgehog" run as it seems like an easier pose to animate.

Once these animations have been put into the game, I can do another play test and gather feedback on how they flow in game. If any particular animations affect how the game feels to play negatively, then I will come back and make adjustments and improvements to them. But for now it's just a matter of getting all the animations done and amending them later.

2.5D Sidescroller Update 6: Idle Animations

I have rigged and skinned my main character and have made a start to animating her. I want this character to be the most polished animated character I have designed, so I've given her 4 Idle animations that she will cycle through while remaining stationary in game. (Face Textures will change in engine to show blinking, yawning and other facial expressions)

Main Idle - Confident Pose

Idle 1 - Stretching

Idle 2 - Looking around and then sighing

Idle 3 - Waiting

Next I'll be working on movement animations. Starting with walk/running animations.

2.5D Sidescroller Update 5: Player Character Design

Darn it, I wanted to graft over the past two weeks but moving out of my student halls and getting the internet back at home slowed me down a little. Anyways I finally got my computer up and running with the internet yesterday. In the time I didn't have a computer I had been messing around and drawing some potential character designs in my notebooks so I would have an easier time getting straight to modelling the character in Maya. I've never attempted to design a female character before, all characters I've designed before were male, so this time I'm gonna try and make a cool female character. Here's a couple of the sketches I did...

This was the first one I drew, there was no real thought or reasoning behind why she looks this way, I just drew whatever came into my head. Steph seemed to like the design regardless, so she drew her own version of the character on the bottom right (which looks miles better in my opinion I can't draw to save my life)

This was a touch up of the previous design while mashing ideas that Steph got from my original drawing. The small circular objects next to her head in my drawing was supposed to be her ears. But Steph thought they were large pearl earrings, which I liked the sound of so I gave her earrings in the redraw. The other things I took were the hair design and the cartoony eyebrows that float above her fringe.

This was the second design I did. It retains the bangles that the previous design had around her arms and legs, however this character doesn't actually have arms. She had a Rayman thing going for her with the floating bangles indicating where her arms WOULD be if she had them. I liked the dress that I gave this one, however I didn't like the face too much. Was too...anime? I dunno, just wasn't a fan. Also I just realized I gave her literal Bart Simpson shoes.

No difference, she stole Bart's sneaks, I didn't even notice.

Moving on, I tried to design a cute monster/mummy character. I was really set on this idea for a while, I was thinking about the opening level and how she could climb out of her coffin at the start of the game. I could design a spooky level, one of my favourite level themes. In the end though, I couldn't draw the character how I wanted them to look, not only that, but if I were to model a mummy character it might be tricky to do and her loose bandages would have to have some sort of physics on them to sway around in game. I still like the idea of this one though, I'll come back to it in the future.

This is just...a clown? Felt like drawing a silly clown and seeing if I could get anything out of it. Didn't get much though besides a laugh.

Here's a cute face. She should of had a body I'm sure, but I was drawing this on a train and my stop came up. I liked the simple, cute face I drew for her though and would keep it in mind for when it came to the final character design.

Here's the work I did yesterday. I made a start to 3D modelling the player character. I was aiming for a mixture of my first design and the one with the dress I liked. I kept the bangles on the arms and legs and gave her large puffy boots similar to Mickey Mouse's shoes. Overall I'm very happy with this design and I'm going to finalize it like this. I experimented with different hair colours and I liked the brown haired one the most.

Before finalizing though I did experiment with different colour palettes. I like the purple one but not too sure about the green and blue one. A cool idea though, if I end up having some extra time at the end of the semester, I could put in these colour palettes as bonus costumes for the players to decide what colour they like the most.

With the character design finalized I planar UV mapped the characters face so I could easily draw her a face. This time I would like my character to be more expressive, so I decided to do a bunch of different face emotions that will change given the context of gameplay. Here we have... Happy, Neutral, Neutral (Mid-Blink), Neutral (Blinking)

Idle Curious 1, Idle Curious 2, Idle Sleepy, Shocked.

Angry, Determined, Cheeky/Cocky, Taking Damage.

Defeated, Injured 1, Injured 2, Panicking.

And that's all I have to show for character design. She is all finished now so next I move onto rigging, painting weights and animating. I should also think of a name for her (which is always the hardest part).