TaleSpire Dev Log 275

Hello everyone!

We're slowly getting back into things after the extended weekend. I think everyone was a little bit more exhausted than we realized. So please bear with us as we get back into the routine of things and start releasing those patches.

For me, the past couple of weeks have been focused on meetings and emails. And even though I still have emails I need to get back to, there is starting to be some room for more fixes and features. 

I've been thinking about persistent emotes in wanting to get some new features out between bug patches. The system is already in place for handling this, which works with Emotes having states represented by an index. States are locations on a timeline. They have different modes, loop, stop or continue. Modes allow them to continuously loop in the middle or wholly stop the Emote from running until the next State shift is called.

The idea is to store this State index on the server per persistent effect currently on the Creature, allowing for status effects, etc.

One of the issues I'm running into is with the Knockdown Emote.

The system heavily revolves around Timeline animations in Unity. We've made some custom clips, but most of the time, we're just animating parent objects inside the Creature hierarchy. This is fine for the wiggles, surprises, etc. But something like laying down requires a bit more spatial awareness.

On the Lich, it works alright. Not perfect, but fine.

On the Dragon, the height makes it a bit awkward. Maybe centering the fall on the base would be better. (maybe not).

And the Cow.. well..

Anyhow. This might be a bit nitpicky, but something has to be done in the case of the Cow.

There are a couple of approaches I've been considering. We could make different Knockdown animations and select them per Creature (in Taleweaver). Different Animations would allow for a lot of potential fun movement associated with the animation. Having one fall backward, one sideways, and maybe even on their "head" in the case of a spider. One of the issues is still special awareness. Where is the "head" of the spider? How wide is the Cow? 

The behavior could be applied via code. Using the bounds of the Creature to determine both which way it should fall and how to center it. Driving the animation via simpler Curves.

This approach probably wouldn't result in as much "character" in the animation but would likely let the Creature "rest" better on the ground.

There might be a third option where the selected animations are then scaled using the bounds of the Creature to land correctly. This might require doing animation differently than the current Timeline system, though, and could be tricky to author. Although it could be reusable in other situations where special awareness is required for an Emote to be "believable."

So that's a bit of insight into what I've been working on this week (other than the business side of things)

I also did some printing during my time off. So, leaving you with another video. I'm still pretty new to the whole resin printing stuff 

Thanks for reading!

Till next time.