First blog post!
Year of the Boomer Shooter
I've been working on various smaller and unsuccessful projects in different engines, mainly Godot engine. Although my projects often end with the same fate- in the the paper bin. Spending a long time thinking about what exactly goes wrong more or less every time- I've realized that I naturally bite of more than I can chew so to speak.
Therefore I've experimented with dividing my obstacles into smaller and more digestible pieces, that can be solved one at a time.
With the retro shooter renaissance in full effect I thought I'd also contribute to a medium I've enjoyed since little.
First person animations
I looked at several older shooters and how their fire animations looked. Here are some interesting examples:
The handgun in Valve's Half Life has significantly more recoil when firing than I remember from my childhood.
Same goes for the Luger in Grey Matter's Return to castle Wolfenstein having much more kick-back than i recall.
PISTOLS! PISTOLS! PISTOLS!
I started off by creating the first pass of the starter pistol animations. Centering the pistol as a small reference to doom because I simply couldn't help myself.
The methodology I went by, was making small movements on one axis at a time. I found the the best way to create smoother animations and easily notice what every individual keyframe needed to look better.
Starting off by transforming the hands back and forth, followed by tilting the wrists in varying positions throughout the many keyframes. Later coming back to each keyframe and touching up even smaller movements to create dynamism in the animations and make them less robot like.
One giant uncertainty is what the best framerate to create animations in is? I've been doing mine in 24fps but maybe it should be higher framerate?
It was important to me that the pistol had kick- and a high impact/feedback when used by the player but still communicating talent with firearms.
In short, I want a visual kick-back but also visual control over the firearm.
Next-up comes reloading which is a favorite of mine.
Non-empty reload
Empty reload
I found these animations super intuitive to make and overall a really good time. But with my next great idea that would not last long.
After deciding that I wanted the player to be able to carry a light source with them, I got to work on creating a lighter and some simple animations for it. Realizing that I was about to set up the rig with the lighter as an individual weapon held in the off-hand and accidently heading down the path of the dreaded Doom 3 flashlight. No good.
This meant I had to to create separate animations with all the weapons eligible for use with the lighter; i.e. more reloads, fires, running, jumping etc. It took such a long time, with almost 3 sleepless nights working around the clock but it is finally in a state I find sufficient for the first pass.
The run animation didn't prove too difficult, it was the reloads that were really rough to make.
None-empty reload
Empty reload
"This is my boomstick"
What is a boomer shooter without the boomiest of boomer shooter weapons: The Super Shotgun
This might be the single most important weapon in the arsenal, defining the rest of the player's weaponry in contrast to the role of the super shotgun. Feedback, power and destruction is the name of the game.
Using the same concept as the other running animations I created one for the shotgun.
Firepower like this should be visually satisfying to shoot, I found this challenging to capture in a way I found 100% appropriate. Nevertheless this is how it came out in the first pass.
This animation proved to come with a few challenges. First of all, the bone constraint that controls the influence from the arm rigs hands to the weapons root bone had to change fluently during the animation. This is due to the right hand being used to insert the shells.
Second issue that came with this animation set is that the weapon essentially has two magazines-bones, one for each shell. I had never before made anything like this and I am quite pleased with the outcome.
CHOP! CHOP!
After Half Life, the melee weapon of the protagonist has also become somewhat of a defining factor in games and although I find this less important than the firearms- I do agree that a solid melee option is always appreciated and also creates opportunities for gameplay mechanics down the line!
My weapon of choice is the classic fire-axe!
I want this to be a strong, one-hit, gore-machine.
That's it for this time. -Sean.