Raptor Racers: Week 2

Progress on the game has been going fairly slow, as our group has had relatively unproductive meetings in terms of content output. However, we did talk about concepts and the future of the game itself. As usual, I was tentative to have my 'head in the clouds' (as Lindsay put it) when it comes to thinking of different game ideas and what we want to accomplish for this semester. In retrospect, yes, most of my ideas were too far fetched. Having different kinds of raptors have special abilities (each requiring their own animation to use, sometimes even a particle system) would've been neat. They also could've had their own individual textures/addons (mainly feathers). Maybe I'll just save these for another post.

Since the group is in general confusion, and now working on their own thing (mainly assignments for other classes), I have decided to focus on animation. Our raptors need an animation for jumping, getting hit by something, breaking (as in, losing speed, and not literally breaking in half), and it is my job to start making them all in Maya. My philosophy seems to be to create more poses and utilize them as much as possible along with the few cycles that we have. Something like a crouching pose blended with the running pose to give the effect of preparation for a jump. That same pose can also be used when the raptor lands. The animation would start out 100% on the crouch pose and gradually let off until the raptor is running again. Or when a Raptor is running and grazes an object. It would be nice if the raptor actually reacted in some way, like getting hit. The reaction would be blended differently depending on how far in the object went. Maybe that's a bit too much, I guess speed could be a good parameter, but I'm not sure. I'll have to play around with the numbers and see what looks right. Hopefully things will turn out looking relatively smooth in the end.


I guess this is also the time to mention that our team has scrapped the idea of having skeletal animations in our game as of last meeting. It was deemed to be too much work for the payoff. The final product was going to look exactly the same anyway, so we decided that we shouldn't spend our precious time doing it. I think we would rather have various shader effects/sound to be in our game and relatively polished, rather than something that no one will be able to tell is in the game (unless we told them). I feel like having something other people can look at and be in awe is more important than a technical detail that only a few people will be impressed about (that is even if they find out).