I wonder how many game actually end up using the mixamo animations in their final product. They have so many good and straight forward animations it’s quite surprising that they’re all free. That would be my segue into talking about adding more actions for my boss. It has at least five distinct attacks now, and it also has a weakness that can be used to lower the challenge. It took awhile to figure out how to get the weakness activated but I managed to nail it down, might have to change it in the future. There were some hiccups when using some mixamo animations that required the model to move with root motion. Not all the bones were aligning but they were easy enough to manually assign. What I can say about the weakness for now is that it will slow down the boss’ movement and attack speed.
After fighting the boss a few more times I got jealous that he had different attacks so I decided to give the player more attacks as well. Through all this I’m learning more about how to add events/functions from the animations themselves using notifies and notify states. Basically at a specific frame of the animation I am calling an action to take place, and then insert the complicated stuff after. This will all be handy since so many of my animations were being handled with delay nodes, not great practice because some functions would fire off despite an animation not finishing. As of now the fighting feels better, but not as dynamic and fun as I want it to be. I’ll keep chipping away at ideas before I have to add stamina as a resource.
Lastly I added a death pose to the characters so I don’t have to delete their bodies once they’re dead. For the player I might add effects later on, but for bosses it’s important that they remain where they fell. Next week will definitely be another week spent improving the boss’ AI and animations.
GoldenGratus Games 