Terrible Tentacle Terror!

So, I managed about 3/4 of Dry January before falling off the wagon. Not a record by any stretch of the imagination but there was a solid few weeks without any booze in there.

Back to gamedev ...

In the last month of the last year I left on the nail-biting cliffhanger of ... modeling yet another enemy. So yeah, 3 years in, and the player is still a placeholder cube ... anyhow, back to that enemy character.

 Tentacles, in gloriously awkward to animate 3D

Tentacles. The scourge of cartoon schoolgirls everywhere (okay, only in Japan - literally nowhere else in the world, it's just Japan).

Cthulhu moves to Japan ...

It turn out that one thing a big bundle of psuedopods has trouble with is avoiding clipping into and colliding with each other when you use the minimum amount of keyframes in an animation. Tentacles turned out to be not that difficult to animate, pose into a nice, organic tentacle shape one way, then n frames later and another keyframe the other way. Let Blender 3D do the "tweening" (which is an animation term apparently for automated process of animating between keyframes) and then tweak the middle frame if it looks funny. Unfortunately there was a lot more frames which ended up needing "tweaking" to stop the writhing mass of extremities becoming a jumble of clashing appendages.

Did I ever mention that everything in game dev takes way longer than it would first appear to? Oh, every blog post? Yep, right ...

Placeholder cube getting snug cuddles from tentacles

Anyhoo, eventually said tentacles where animated, calibrated, datablocked into actually enemy AI and unleashed into a game level for tweaking - and boy did they need some tweaking. Player ended up squished rather quickly, then it was a case of tweaking data from too easy to too hard until it met in the middle somewhere.

Big tentacle, little tentacle

During testing I noticed an issue. Every so often a tentacle would fall from the sky past the camera to where it was supposed to be in the XYZ of the game world. I've seen this happen with other models  before and each time I fixed it and then forgotten what the cause was. The last time I fixed it I remember thinking that next time I will know the cause adn solution ... except for I have forgotten it again ...

I went back and checked through my written notes on exporting animations and then through all my "how to" forum posts ... and it looks like I didn't record the reasons anywhere. It's got something to do with animation or COLLADA format export - but that's as good as my memory is helping right now ... so a bit more testing and tweaking of the model and exporter is required,

Tentacle surprise!

I also made a whole load of really cool effects, like spawning and fleeing and attacking - but in actual playtesting there was so much going on that a lot of it is easily missed and the constant rattle of tentacles bursting through the ground gets rather annoying, so I plan on simplifying the audio and also some of the particle effects.

So, that's pretty much January covered. There was some other maths related stuff concerning getting player evasion to trigger the way the player is moving when it's different from the way they are facing - which ended up being more difficult than expected because I forgot to take randomized camera rotation into account on spawning and also forgot about normalizing vectors in 3D space - but it was mostly tentacle animating.

To be continued ... possibly indefinately at this rate ... naw I'm just kidding, I'll ship before Half Life 3.

Space Year 2018 Where You Go?

2018 be like ...

RIP 2018

And so all good things come to an end ... and so do all bad and indifferent things too.

For December I spent most of my time starting early on that festive gorging ...

Me, one week into December

Me, December 31st

However it's not all been shoveling cheese, pate, chocolates, nuts, unidentifiable high fat stuff and booze down my cakehole as fast as possible. It's just that it's been mostly that ...

I've spent the dev time this month mainly on balancing my still untitled top-down, twin-stick, mecha-musume, nekomimi, Swag 'Em Up. This has led to a fair bit of tweaking and minor/major adjustments as I test full playthroughs to make sure things don't become overly difficult - if the creator cannot escape a level how on earth will a player?

I've only 2 more levels of enemies to model and animate. One of these enemy types are tentacles which I had been dreading from the animation point of view. However I managed to find a good monster model with plenty of tentacles and animations which could serve as a basis for my own work. This model had a whopping 170+ animated bones which exceeds the engine capacity for a single armature. Happily I only wanted the tentacle bones and so could delete the rest, but this still came in at a rather whopping 18 bones per tentacle for 6 tentacles. Now whilst only the level boss monster will have all the tentacles with the standard level enemies ranging from 1 to 3, I felt that this number of bones could still be halved with a bit of merging weight painting and manually repositioning animation keys to make up for the reduced transforms.

Tentacles, the scourge of cat-eared, cartoon schoolgirls everywhere ...

I also found another boss style monster that had some great animations for special attacks and the sort, so added that to my ever growing library of commercially licensed animations.

The cunning plan for 2019 ...

Finish off the last 2 level monsters, something I had hoped to have completed by now but meh ...

Create the boss models and animations. Each level has a cat/fox/etc eared defender, often accompanyed by a larger monster to do all the dirty work whilst said fluffy eared guardian shout abuse at the player from an animated GUI box.

Sort out the remaining special item models and animations.

Both of the above points feature around the player models. (Hopefully) 2019 will be the year when the yellow placeholder cube is retired in favour of (multiple) player characters. I am planning on having around 8 playable characters with differing abilities and special attacks, and so far have 2 of them fully coded.

Anyhow, roll on January so this festive excess can finally end ...