Introduction:
Hi!
My name is Kabi.

In my blog posts I’ll mainly be documenting and talking about the game’s inputs and the feedback it has on the player, I’ll also talk a bit about asset creation, asset management, animation control and player controls scripting.

What I did last week:
The control scheme we’ll use is heavily based on the standardized first person shooters controls. This goes for both controller support and mouse and keyboard.
This will go smoothly for mouse and keyboard, but as the game is heavily based on jet pack movement, something not really used much on most first person shooters. To combat this I’ve put together a small list of games with similar movements to what we would want for me to test out and reference.

I started to go through and test each one and basically note the differences in how it changes the gameplay and most importantly why it feels good or bad to use.

Having all this documented helps to put it in a great objective perspective which in itself makes it easy to get feedback on it and to finally generate a broader view on the subject that can later be applied to the actual game.

Placeholder animations and meshes
As we aren’t yet sure if we will have the time to create our own animations and models I sought out to get us something to use in the meantime.
For the characters model and animations we used mixamo.com.
It’s a bit too limited of a service, but it’s fast and free.
It does create some problems though, their skeleton rig is very basic and lacks any source files.
This means that we can’t just tweak animations, as it all comes in .fbx files where the keyframes are baked.
It’s not a huge problem for us, as we will more than likely stick to the placeholders so we can focus on game mechanics instead of creating assets.

Blend spaces
This was completely new to me and really surprised me with how easy and straightforward it was to implement. Every time I’ve seen someone working with it I’ve always thought that looks interesting, but too complicated to jump into on a short notice.
But shame on assumptions, it took me less than a day and I had the basics down!

What I’m doing this week:
I’ve started working refining the character movement, At the start of this week it looked something like this:

No spring arms and the character didn’t follow the cameras direction.

And after just a short while I had something like this:

Now the camera moves smoother with the character and the upper body follows the camera direction.

It’s good to get these things down early on as they change how testing is received.
For instance, If we run a game test where we want people to test a flight mechanic but we haven’t done any animations and the character is in a T-pose… Most of the feedback will be about the T-pose.

For the rest of the week I plan on setting up the controller support and experimenting with some controller mappings and potential extra systems that are often necessary when playing a shooter game with a controller.