October 6, 2022
A good chunk of time this week was spent on working through the Game Design Document V1 and the presentation for it during our Monday labs.
Making the GDD involved making the functional flowboard:
As well as the core game loop and narrative flowboard:
And a few other things that are in the submitted document, such as a couple new concept sketches to illustrate some smart depth mechanics I described in the GDD:
I also did some rough modelling, rigging, and posing on what the final boss (Warlord) may look like; a large, monstrous being with spikes in his body, right arm missing, part of his face consumed, and wielding a very long sword.
Back to the development of the game, we need to start making some attacks for the character. So, I animated a number of different sword swings in Blender. I’m relatively new to animation, so getting the right look for how motion should flow through one’s body when they’re swinging with a sword was challenging. Regardless, after a number of iterations, I had a couple I was ready to use:
Back in Unity, I added the animations to the player on certain button presses, but simply swinging the sword looked rather weak. This is where weapon trails/smears come into play. They add a sense of motion and strength to swinging or weapon or whatever else, and by using a particle system parented to the sword object and tweaking the trails, I was able to get some pretty good looking sword swings.
I whipped up a very basic skull model that would serve as a test enemy for early development and short script to manage a health bar.