As a quick reminder, my project is a third person action game focused on combat, and is set in an arena.
This week the bulk of my attention went into refining the animation blueprint for my character's attacks. The first thing I did was source some animations from Mixamo that blended together to create a fluid combo attack. Once I had this I created variables in my animation blueprint that would check when the player was attacking, and how many hits they were on, the purpose of this was to make sure that the correct animation played for the correct hit. However, I had issues blending the animations together and getting them to work properly. My supervisor suggested creating poses that the character could just transition to instead of having to make sure the animations timings were correct. Thinking on this gave me the idea to have the game become more cartoony/comic-y in it's aesthetic as opposed to the semi realistic one I had first imagined. I also decided to change the player's weapon from a hammer to a gauntlet, similar to Hellboy's Right Hand of Doom.
Now I have a new weapon, I also had to look for some new reference poses that worked with it, for this I looked at comics, one of the main ones I looked at was World War Hulk simply because I already own it. I used an image that had him throwing a punch, and then created some of my own reference images for the combo that I envisioned.
This is the combo that I created, also to fit my new comic book aesthetic I collaborated with a graphic designer to create some pop-art themed impact bubbles, these will show up each time the player makes an attack.
I finished most of what I set out to complete this week, and by reverting back to the base UE4 mannequin I even saved myself some work later down the line.
For next week I aim to have finished with the base functionality of the combat system and work on making it feel better.
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