BLOG ENTRY 22 - 02.19.2021

The groove has mostly continued. except for a day where my body just told me to take a 12 hour nap, but I’ve been really productive getting some polish in to be able to work off the intended look and feel and not have to adjust a bunch of things later as I’m having to do now. I’ve already been researching a method to attach weapons and gear to the player character but it’s not done yet, so I had to do some hacky solutions. It is what it is.

ASSET MANAGEMENT

I was able to import a bunch of the paragon assets into the project. I have a few that I’ve been trying to get in for a while, but last time I attempted this I completely busted the build beyond belief. Fortunately since then I’ve been introduced into the wonderful world of source control so I’m a little more confident when it comes to experimenting since I can easily roll back.

Thanks to this I’m being able to set up some cool animations for each character so they can start having not only class identity but also readability. I have a couple of plans on how to start setting up diegetic skill components. I’ll start doing the setup work for that later this weekend.

NEW ANIMATIONS

First off I added a hair mesh from an asset pack that I got from the Unreal Marketplace a while back but hadn’t even done a project to try and get the assets out of it. To be quite honest I don’t think I had the skills before to even be able to export the mesh correctly let alone apply it and make it look good, but here we are and she’s got her new hairdo, and she looks great IMO.

Second I used an animation set from a Paragon character named Revenant. I made a whole new animation blendspace for her to be able to use the new animations. Retargeting animations took fucking forever, and I’m certain is because of my PC showing it’s age, not much I can do to speed that up until I get an upgrade. As long as I’m able to get something done I’m gonna keep working.

I started working on the Nanoweaver class weapon prototype. Going with the space mage archetype I retargeted some animations from Paragons Phase. I know a lot of people use her animation sets but they are really well made. I did have a weird bug when first retargeting where the idle pose rotated the shoulders and hands in a very strange way, but ONLY the idle animation, everything else worked fine. Once I fixed that she started looking way better.

I made a makeshift weapon with some knife assets and had a whole day trying to align them correctly so the projectile would shoot at the right height, it was quite an adventure but it’s done for the time being.

I’ve started doing the ground work for the alternate fire which will be a constant beam. rather than forcing you to stand still to cast the beam I’ve decided that It would be way less punishing to slow down your move speed to 30% for the duration of the beam cast. You can see in the gif how the speed changes when the alt fire is pressed and released.

It’s still very much a work in progress but I’m already getting the right feel and at the very least the line trace where the beam is going to be is working as intended. I have to do some research on how to do beam weapons in general as well as implement the constant damage, see how long you should have to hit an enemy in order for it to feel satisfying. Too long and you’re going to get bored. Too short and might as well use regular fire. Still a long way to go for that to get done right.

MORE WIP

I still haven’t finished the Technicians homing weapon because I got distracted doing all of this. Between the asset importing, animation retargeting, and setting up the weapon offset so they fire in the correct direction took quite a while of my week.

I have also researching customization and how it works behind the scenes has been quite interesting, at first I thought it would be way too much work but I think there is a possibility that I could make a system to just change a few things. like gear color and hair style. I haven’t decided if I’m going to have the option to recolor the hair as I think it’s kind of part of the character design. but then again everyone likes different types of hair so… yeah… have to make that decision, because having that level of customization really does increase the workload quite a bit, have to make sure it’s worth the effort.

For now I’ve got to keep the character build and weapon system as my main focus as I’ve realized it’s definitely the hook of this game, and I have to pay a lot of attention to what works and what doesn’t. in any case I’ll be posting the Lt. updated animations on twitter tomorrow for screenshot Saturday. I’m really proud of how she’s coming along.

Strutting my stuff

Daniel “Freaky” Aguilar

Game Designer

Plasmapunk Studios

New Haircut, New Strut