Log 04

My goal was to finish with logistics by the end of June, and get to actual play content in July, with the goal of finishing the first scene by the end of July.

I’m no sure how close I am to accomplishing that goal, but I did spend those two weeks mostly working on content. Specifically, on developing the WEAPONS that Machine and Gunner fight, and the fight scene animations for the first scene.

Shadows

I decided long ago that I wanted the WEAPONS to never show up as physical objects, and that they would be shadows projected on the wall. I worried that it’d be difficult to render that, but fortunately Unity already supports rendering objects only as shadows. So the base rendering is done…but I still need to program the WEAPONS flying in and out during that section. Without it looking bad. I don’t know if I have enough animation skill to actually pull off the scene that I’m imagining in my head. It looks kind of clunky at the moment.

MACHINE animations

I also finally stopped procrastinating on making MACHINE’s animation controller. The nice thing about bone-based animations is that you can separate the torso animations from the leg animations, so now MACHINE can run and carry her gun like someone would actually carry a gun while running.

I also animated a few shooting animations for her. I want to do some additional animation layering on top of that; maybe make it so that she doesn’t always aim in the same place, maybe have some explosions happen where she hits, etc. But the basics are there.

Oh yeah, explosions work! I can just…explode things? Wild. But they’re still kind of clunky to create on the timeline. And they all look identical. I’ll want some more variation in them first.

A video of results up to this point:

At this point, MACHINE’s animations up to the firefight are done. But the actual scene is still very incomplete; I need a lot more light effects to make it look like a proper firefight, and more WEAPONS, more explosions…and make MACHINE’s animations not quite as stiff. Unity has an animation package that lets you move individual limbs on top of existing animations, so I’ll probably end up using that. Which is another thing to learn (relearn, as I tried using it before and failed.)

The arm is fully animated in this scene, but some of the animations look pretty bad. Namely, the one where it shows up, punches a WEAPON into dust, and then flies off. The punch looks more like a sideways twitch right now. I have no idea how to animate a disembodied flying punch. The system also makes it difficult to have very rapid light changes right now, so that’s another thing I’ll have to consider as I keep working on this. The firefight scene should probably have a lot of moving lights. Next Up

Lighting, lighting, lighting. Time to make the firefight scene. That means having the ‘warning lights’ blare on and off, that means having various lights pulse to emulate fired shots, that means maybe having lasers span the stage. And WEAPONS flying all over the place.

My original goal was to get this all done by July, but July became busier than I wanted. We’ll see where things end up. oh, I should also start thinking about sounds, because they’ll be crucial to making the firefight, well, sound like a firefight. Sound effects more than music. I don’t know what I’d do about music yet.