4 - Camera + Attack animations

I want to clarify the purpose of this blog is mostly for progress updates on the new game. It will include a bit of technical details but I'm not planning to make it a technical blog. We'll mainly just cover what's going on in the latest build and talk about some of my design philosophy.

This post will just be an update about what I worked on today. First of all, I added a crosshair - this is going to be important because there will be many abilities that are targetted, and most abilities will be at least somewhat directional. When I added the crosshair, I realized that the player character was too centered in the screen, so I moved the player character to the bottom 1/3rd of the screen instead. This is the approach used by most over the shoulder games (I mean it's called over the shoulder for a reason, right?), I just didn't realize until I loaded up the game with the crosshair stuck directly in the character's back.

This is how the crosshair looks after I fixed that.

Next I started thinking about attack animations. For our first class, which will be a warrior archetype, I started by implementing a two swing combo used by holding the left mouse button. I used two masks to seperate the upper half and lower half of the body's animations, so that I could have the legs walking while the torso was swinging. This doesn't look perfect but it looks pretty good (and I'm still essentially using placeholder animations here - just throwing it together for speed and prototyping). I'm actually pretty happy with how they turned out. I also added a shader to the player character so the shadows don't affect him so much.

My brother Jake doing a jump attack while I look at the sun (showing the new shader).

Finally, I worked a lot on the camera. It still needs some work, I need a better strategy for handling the camera getting stuck on walls, but I have a nice system in place. Hard walls (like houses, terrain) block the camera, and it moves along the surface of the wall (closer to the player). Everything else gets a dither shader applied to it to give it partial transparency and to signal to the player "you're looking through a solid object". This is the approach games like Genshin Impact use and it works perfect here too. I'm super happy how it turned out.

Here you can see a tree faded out by the dithering shader.

Finally, I spent some time thinking about the character building systems. My current idea is that every weapon will have an active ability tied to it (think a thrust attack for a rapier or a wide swing for a greatsword). The attacks will have different physical animations as well as different interactions with the stat system. For example, you might be able to do extra piercing damage with your build, and you'd want a rapier with a piercing active ability. I'd also allow for the player to extract abilities and put them into other weapons using the crafting system (within reason, no piercing attacks on a mace for example).

The nice thing about this idea is it gives the player an active skill to work with right out of the gate, without any research into the character progression system. I'd even have something like a blacksmith in town with a variety of level 1 weapons - I'd give the player just enough gold to buy whichever they liked to ensure that skilled players can play with the active skills they like immediately.

The character progression system itself I'm thinking will give each class 3 skill trees. Think kind of like World of Warcraft's talent trees (at least in Vanilla WoW through Cata). These would be shorter than WoW's talent trees, and they'd have a mix of active and passive abilities. The warrior might have a tactics and a berserker tree; the rogue might have an assassination and an acrobatics tree, and so on. I'm thinking the level cap of this game will be around 30, so I'd want each tier of the talent trees to unlock after 3 points of investment (at levels 4, 7, 10, so on). The cool idea I had though, would be at level 10 and level 20 you can pick a talent tree from any other class. This would mean a warrior could take the acrobatics tree from rogue at level 10. I'll play with this idea but I'm pretty excited about the potential.