A fun third person character has signature moves, that have clear actions. Mario can do so many things with only his jump, and there are layers beyond that with how you can manipulate his actions. I want to follow Nintendo’s design philosophy when it comes to creating the player character. I removed the ability to grab objects and throw them back. For now it will be a simple push and pull. My morning was spent trying to get the character to swing around with a whip. The guide I found was tailored to a first person perspective, so it didn’t work the way I wanted it to. It was fun, but not what I needed.
Afterwards I began to think about making the animations a little more refined. I looked into how to import the animations from Mixamo, this website with free 3D models and animations. Since a lot of channels on YouTube use assets from the site, it would be good for me to finally learn. Turns out it is really easy to get animations from them and put it into Unreal, just a few simple steps if you’re used to the program already. I wanted to have better animations for the whip, so it actually looked powerful.
I spent many hours trying different animations and tweaking the values of the whip distance, and timers with it appearing and disappearing. It’s looking a lot better, but it is not as perfect as I want it to be. There are issues with the cable actor that causes the whip not to come from the character’s hand. I’ll need to look into that. The further I get into animation the more I am convinced I need to start creating a more pleasing character model. This week I’ll watch the videos I have lined up on creating one, possibly from scratch. Then once I have one that is pristine and working, I can move on to refining the character even more.
The last thing I worked on was affecting the crosshair/center dot in real time. So now it it will become red when an object is in range that can be affected by the whip. Since it’s difficult to tell how far the whip can actually go, this was my solution. Eventually I’ll add a marker that indicates which objects you can grapple and swing from. Readability in a game is very important, without overwhelming the player with too much information. I want the game to be visually pleasing, and easy to understand.
Soon we shall see what a real Haunter looks like.
GoldenGratus Games 