I feel like I should be filling out a design wiki. What’s the easiest way to start a wiki?
Anyways,
This doesn’t look too different from what I’ve made before, except a lot of it is generated on the fly. There are just a handful of keyframes and some smart animation blending. Which I think is going to make a huge difference.
Before I would come up with a lot of concepts for weapons, but in the end, I only wanted them to vary in a few ways.
- Damage
- Range
- Speed (startup, action, recovery)
- Available attacks
- Attack strings
Animations
I find that coming up with a lot of different animations for what amounts to just a few attacks doesn’t work for me. So what I did was break down items into a few categories that can all share the same animations but have different damage, range, and especially animation timings for startup/action/recovery portions of their available attacks.
The animation timings will be really important in terms of describing the weapons via their mechanics. Heavy weapons will generally be slower, but if they’re heavy and longer reaching that means they’ll be much slower during recovery. Slowing down the startup of a dagger stab animation won’t describe weight as much as dexterity necessary to find the sweet spot.
There are other ways I want to differentiate weapons, but it’ll take some time to really figure out. I want to make sure to have weapons that don’t do a lot of damage up front, but do secondary/tertiary things. Weapons that stun or knockback are going to be really good ways to different one from another.
I think the animation categories are going to be really important. Right now I am looking at only two main categories: 1h melee, 2h melee, alternating. I am sure there will be weapon types that don’t fit this, but I’ll explore that as I bring the old weapons back:
- Forehand (swing left)
- Overhead (swing down)
- Backhand (swing right)
- Underhand (swing up)
- Stab
- *Special
One of the interesting things I noticed from these animations is that they break down into repeatable motions. E.g. Forehand and Overhead can both start with the same startup action. Backhand and Underhand can both start with the the same startup actions as well.
Even more interesting is that the recovery for Forehand looks really similar to the startup for Backhand and Underhand. And Backhand/Underhand seem to finish in a way that’s similar to the startup to Forehand. The repeatable left/right/left attack string is kind of baked into this? And a left/up/down string is as well?
I’ll stew on this for a while. I think I should be developing a 3D platformer w/ the engine right now, so this might take a while to implement…