This week I added a pickup animation. I manipulate the animation with FABRIK such that the character touches the object it’s picking up.
Then I created a system to play weapon-equip and disarm animations. The tricky part was weapon switching. To play the animation smoothly one after the other was not as straightforward as expected. Since I hadn’t decided where the weapon would be placed, I didn’t spend too much time selecting proper animations.
Then I started to add the combat system. I decided to use box and line tracing for the weapon tracing. Attaching collision boxes didn’t work as expected if the collider was not the root element of the weapon blueprint. So I had no access to the enemies’ bone names. It took me some workaround to access them.
The line trace was added after discovering that the box trace was not precise enough with a low frame rate. Overall I understand ALS4 and the animation system way better than before.
Now it’s possible to dismember zombies with melee weapons, and it’s already fun, although I am using knife combat animations and have almost no visual feedback. I found these two animation packs – Sword and TwoHandSword. They look much smoother, and I imagine they also work with an axe, hammer, or crowbar :).
Marketing
For marketing, I created a Twitter and YouTube account. I will participate in #ScreenshotSaturday and post some videos here and there.
Next Week
Next week I want to create a simple example project to test GAS, and I want to try if it makes sense to add ragdoll animations as hit responses for the zombies. I will add the UI, which only displays a crosshair but also works on splitscreen.
After that, I will try to create a road map for the reveal trailer, which should be the first milestone.
