New weapon reveal & State of Development

To kick things off, I present to you: the Trinity Cannon! One of many weapon transformations at your disposal in Blood Crisis. Modelled and textured in roughly two days. I like how it turned out!!

With the new stuff out of the way, let's talk revisions!

My last post was perhaps a bit of a premature celebration, as it turned out the skirt rig worked great for posing, but ended up being a nightmare to animate. I've created a third, and (hopefully!) final rig that's considerably more lightweight while also providing greater control. As you can see, the entire shape of the skirt can be manipulated with only two controllers. 

I've also incorporated a handy space-switcher, so that I can change whether or not the skirt moves with the rest of the body. Notice how the right side stays in place, while the left side follows the controller? This is super useful for animating, and while it was included in the last rig, it didn't work nearly as well.

Now, onto the state of development. I know posts have been relatively stagnant the last few months, and that's mostly because I've been pouring my whole heart and soul into Velle. Their rig took a considerable amount of time, and I've come out the other side considerably more skilled. As I begin assembling Velle's animations, there are a few things I still need to get out of the way before I can properly implement combos. In order from most to least important, they are:

#1 - Enemy "Pushing"

So, there's a relatively consistent issue I ran into months ago when I was creating Alpha's player capsule, and that's the issue of simple collision. While I did craft a temporary solution, it is a bug-ridden mess. Enemies frequently get stuck on each other, walls, the player, and it's generally pretty bad. 

However, there's no reason to re-invent the wheel, and someone has already created a system for this. I purchased the plugin a few months ago before starting on Velle's character model/rig but never got around to implementing it. This system is extremely integral to the game's core mechanisms, as player/enemy collision is a very frequent event, and I don't want small enemies to be able to swarm and corner the player. This is something that needs to be implemented before anything else coding-wise.

#2 - Hitboxes

This could be considered part of combos, but I need to set up a parent class for all hitboxes that contains the core variables each will need. Things like damage amount, damage type, hitback, strength, etc.

#3 - Lockon

I'm not really sure how long this will take, as I've already implemented a lockon system (also from the UE marketplace!), but I need to implement a "soft-lock". Basically, when you are close to enemies, you will see a lock-on sprite that doesn't affect the camera, but if "lockon" is engaged, will snap the camera to that enemy. This has twofold usage, one that it allows players to know which enemy will be locked on to before affecting the camera, and the second causes the player to auto-orient towards whichever enemy is soft-locked onto if they choose to attack.

Assuming I can clean up my base code and get an animation set together for Velle, I should have combos up and running within the next couple months.