Weekly Dev Diary #10 - Run and roll animation

Howdy,
it's animation time again! This time around, I'd like to talk more about the way we look at character movement & animations.

RESPONSIVENESS BEATS VISUALS, EVERY SINGLE TIME

One of the things I can really appreciate in games is the feeling of responsiveness, 
and the way character reacts to my commands every time I press the button.
That's why I think it's really important, to have swift immediate reactions to player actions. Animations needs to reflect it from the start.

FORWARD MOTION - ROLL

For example the roll - forward motion, that ÆBone mentioned in the earlier dev diary.
We went through several iterations, to improve responsiveness and speed over time, until it felt just right.

The roll forward anim process started with simple roll forward animation, beginning from "idle pose" through "roll anim" and back to "idle pose"
But this felt slow and unresponsive, so we cut the first&last few frames, which did the trick, and the overall feeling started to feel about right.

There is still things to improve and we will polish the things as we test them throughout the development.

We will keep forward motion linear, which will make it easier to scale speed and connect it to our multiplayer prediction server/client system.

 

RUN

One of the first animations I created was run. I was aiming for fast speedy run movement, but once it was finished and put in the game, it turns out the run was just a bit too fast. I needed to slow it down, which resulted in the new slower run animation, that suited the character game movement much better.

Then we started to tinker with animation blends and used both animations for situations where player character will gain some movement speed and the result you can see below in the video. Nice smooth animation which will suite both fast or slower running characters with transition in between.

If you will have any questions you can find me at our Discord channel.

As always, stay awesome!

- Fade