Basic Movement & Art Progress

Introduction

For this week, our team works basically finish the design of the main combat system and start to implement some simple control scripts

Movement Scripts

General Movement

For testing the movement and combat, I create several simple animations to test it out. Currently, the character has several states available: idle, walk, dodge, run, and 5 attack state

"Foot Sliding"

In order to make the attack action more realistic and comfortable, I add some small displacement when the characters are attacking, this simulates the effects of root motion on rigging models.

This "Foot Sliding" effect is very important for Action games, it not only makes sure the character's motion looks natural, but also ensures the player won't lose the target when it keeps pushing back the enemies. 

Preread Input System

Usually, in ACT games, character attack animation has three stages: pre-attack, attack, and post-attack.

     Pre-attack: the character is prepared to perform the attack action, in this stage, no "damage logic" will be computed

     Attack: the frames that attack logic will be computed

     Post-Attack: the frames after the attack logic (usually a transition animation back to idle state)

These are very important in a combo system: A nice combo transition usually occurs in the later frames in the "Attack" stage and the early frames in the "Post-Attack" stage. However, if we only start to read the player's input at those two time points, it is highly possible that the player will not have a smooth attack transition (the rate that humans touch the same key repeatedly is around 150ms, hence they may miss the best frame for animation transition).

Hence, I developed a preread input system to ensure it players will have a better combat experience. I think it is very important to add it in the early stage of development because our game will mostly focus on combat.

Here, you can see a comparison between "without preread"(up) and "with preread" (down)

Character & Enemy Animations

Character Animations

Since we lack artists, I paid a pixel art artist to draw our character animations (way better than what I draw lol)

Enemies Animations

Because of budget issues, we will draw the enemies ourselves, currently, there is only one team member(not a professional artist) is working on the enemy animations, so this progress is going slowly.