Well, the crouch attack animation ended up being much more work than I had previously anticipated. I had expected it to take a day or two to get it finished and implemented, but it ended up taking the better part of this week. I was not aided in this endeavor by an unwelcome, if not particularly surprising, heatwave, which, along with numerous petty/important distractions and side-tasks, slowed the process down. Nevertheless, the animation is done, it’s imported into the game, it works. All is well.
Here’s what it looks like now:
Implementing these animations has revealed a few problems in the animation system in terms of which animations take priority. It usually doesn’t come up, as only one animation could logically be desired at most given times but, based on whether you attack at the end of a roll or roll at the end of an attack, you probably want whichever comes last to take priority – which isn’t something it’s really set up for right now. Since it’s just that one issue I may just patch it up as best as I can within the current system, but it’s worth considering the idea of implementing something more robust in the future.
Also, though I said before that once the crouch attack animations were complete I’d be done with the animations required for chapter 1, I realized this week that that isn’t quite the case. I’d completely forgotten reaction animations, those needed for reacting to getting hit or to running out of health and reaching a failure state. These are pretty important animations, I’d say, but they’ll be extremely difficult to test until I actually implement the attack system so they’re going to be tabled for now.
As I did not feel like diving immediately back into the code base after completing that animation, I’ve been spending the last couple of days trying to work on one of the musical pieces required for the first chapter of the game. This is the theme for the Ruins area, what at first seems to be an exciting land of adventure and thrills, full of treasures and mysteries, all of which seem to be just around the next corner… or the next, or the next, or perhaps the next….
Well, maybe not a lot of progress this week. Sometimes you can work hard and just not have a lot to show for it. Hopefully over the next few days this musical problem will click into place and I can complete that piece, which will mean most of the music for chapter 1 will be at least sketched out. After that, I have a list of programming tasks to attend to, foremost among them implementing a system for attacking and doing damage – as well as receiving it.
One final note: Next week is DevBlog 52, which, since I do these weekly, means that will have been working on this project regularly for about a year. I’m going to take that opportunity to look back and see how far the project has come in that time. I’m not sure whether I’ll end up finding that really depressing or encouraging, but it should be worthwhile at any rate.