First animations…

…of which unfortunately I couldn’t make a video of… For some reason, my FRAPS stopped working on my modeler plugins, so the videos for these will have to wait until we can add the character to the actual game (which will only happen when I finish the mechanical aspects of the RPG system and we have some background art to put in place in a test scene).

Anyway, here’s some screenshots of poses:

This is in the middle of the walk cycle… We have two “walk cycles”: the run that we use in most of the game, and the walk cycle itself, slower than the run, that will mostly be used in cutscenes (if we happen to have animated cutscenes, we’re still debating that).

Here’s something we don’t want to see that often: end of the death animation!

This is just the middle of one of the life-shaping animations…

We want to see if we can add a system to our authoring tools so that we can use the same animations for other characters in the game, without having to remake them for a specific character… Of course in some cases that may look strange (since the center of mass, weight, etc of the characters change, so it changes the way they move), but considering the screen-size of most characters, it should be ok… besides, we’re a very small team, so we have to think what gets us more bang for a buck!

Making an animation done for a character work with another one is not simple task, but I have some ideas I want to try, and hopefully with some artist-guided parameters, we can make the process work… More on this in the future, hopefully (when we get another character to try this out).

In the meantime, I’m working on the mechanical aspects of the RPG (more than specific problems, I’m solving macro-problems like how does the buff system work, etc), so nothing interesting to show for it (not even graphics!)… but I got the buff system working (pretty flexible one, that requires little code to put in a new buff type).

Rincewind is working on assets for the Calabeth graveyard, that we intend to use in our “arena” experiment area (that we intend to release as pre-alpha releases for testers, but more on this on Monday’s post).