Behold. I have come to thee this week bearing great gifts in the form of animations.

Much like last week, this week is all about animations. BUT TO WHAT END?

The goal was simple. Get Dawksin back in action with the same criteria as before. No big deal, we did it before and we can do it again… BUT BETTER.

So, what would we do differently?

Making Some Changes Around Here

Dawksin differs from the default player character in a pretty significant way. He can equip and unequip his weapons after being out of combat for a bit. This actually existed in the last project for a little while, but we had to shelve it because we didn’t have enough time to implement it properly before getting the demo out.

But this time around, he’s going to make full use of his new passive and be able to summon his swords and get a damage boost on his first attack. So lets jot down what we need for that.

• The same animations as before, but without holding anything.
• That’s a lot of animations.
• Good lord that’s so many animations.
• Why did we think this was a good idea?
• Its not too late, we can just not do this.

So we made all of the animations.

Leveraging all of the animations we already made, it was relatively straightforward, just incredibly time consuming.

Animation retargeting lets us take existing animations and roughly match them to a different character, but with the trade-off that they’ all have some problems. Mostly things like hands not matching up, feet going through the floor, my will to live quickly fading, etc.

Took all of those animations and edited them to fit Dawksin and made one set for him holding his swords and a second one where he’s not holding anything.

He can now move in all directions, dodge, turn in place, all that good stuff. So what’s left? Oh yeah.

ATTACKS

Dawksin has an interesting playstyle where he deals relatively little damage, and instead leaves shrapnel stacks inside enemies to rip out later as execute damage. So, his attacks need to be quick so he can leave tons of stacks in each enemy he hits.

The usual 4 attacks isnt enough, so we’re going to up that a bit and have 7 attacks total.

Light Attacks

• An opener that’s fairly quick to start
• 5 attacks that ramp up in speed heading towards the end
• A finisher with a brief pause before looping back to the beginning

Might need to adjust the speed faster or slower when we do a bit more testing, but I have a hunch it might be too fast.

HEavy/Charge Attacks

• Heavy attacks can all be charged, so by design, these cant be fast.
• Same 3 combo setup as before
• Easy Peasy

Situational Attacks

Each one of these has a light attack and heavy attack variant.

• Dodge Attack
• Sprinting Attack
• Air Attack

Ok, so Dawksin is just about done in less than a week. Pretty cool, now we can move on to-

After 0.1 seconds of testing. Yes. It would be cool, and he feels incomplete without it.

Now we have to do it.

Rinse and repeat for every attack type and now we can call him complete. I’ll keep all the different variants under wraps for now so you can try them all youself in game.

All in all, not too bad for a weeks worth of work. Its certainly way more than the standard 65 animations from last week.

I mean, who’s counting? Haha.

Still worth it. See ya’ll next week.