Capstone Blog Post 9: New Camera and procedural animation system
This week the team focused on a few major areas of both art integration and the games camera system. The first thing we did was create functionality for the camera to dynamically scale during game play instead of sitting there statically. This was a bit of a technical challenge as this meant having to get both the camera scaling system working well with the screen wrap system. Because of this, our camera system has grown to be a slightly complex but powerful system. Now both systems work very well together and this now allows us to scale the size of the players screen up and down to always keep targets of interest (mainly chroma thrones, players, and grapple hook points) within the camera view at all times. This adds significantly to the visual look of the game as things feel very dynamic and smooth while still accomplishing our goal of having smooth screen wrap.
To go along with this system we had to also update the stage design to accompany it. We have wanted for a while to enlarge the stage and so we used this sprint to address that during this. The first thing we did was to elongate the stage. We did so to not only make the stage less cramped but also give players more territory to capture.
Another big win for this sprint was the creation of the framework used to make all of our animations procedural. Based off of the overgrowth method of animation, we will be able to greatly lighten the load on our artist with this tech as we will be able to transition animation’s using code which means overall less work that needs to be done in the animation department. The way this method works is by linking the animation playback speed to a game object and then rotating that game object in game to produce the animation. The gif below shows the character walking. The purple circle around the player is a visual indicator of the rotation of the sphere. The gif isn’t as smooth as the actual result due to file size restrictions but you should get the idea. Now we can implement our character meshes and animations into the build by next sprint.
