A Hodgepodge of Updates

We’ve been trying to get away from the “Art Updates Part n” titles to be a bit more descriptive with our recent posts.  But this update could very well be a continuation of those parts with the hodgepodge of art and functionality that were updated the last couple of months.  They say the best way to explain is to show, not tell.  So without further ado, let’s show and not tell:

Updated Weapon Icons

When picking up a weapon, or seeing it in our inventory, a different graphic is represented than the graphic used for combat.  We’ve updated all the icons at 4 different resolutions: the smallest for the HUD, 1x for normal gameplay, 2x for the inventory and 3x for seeing the item in descriptive dialog page.  Our artist, Tony, had to draw out each of these essentially four times — it was a blast 😉  Below are a few of these icons at the highest resolution:

Docks and Bridges

Below are a couple of screenshots in the northern mountains with the newly updated bridge and docks graphics:

Bow and Arrow Animations

As simple as the bow an arrow animations look, there were quite a bit of updates from a functionality standpoint that we had do in order to pull all of this off in game.  In the Other Notable Updates section, we’ll go into more detail about all of that.  Below are a few animations for the hero and Orc:

Hero Stun and Death Animations

We also decided it was finally time to have our hero get hurt and die:

Pickup / Throw / Setback Down

We also added all the animations associated with picking up and throwing objects.  Similar to the bow and arrow, we also had to add walking animations for holding and running.  Below are a few updated animations:

Other Notable Updates

Last time we introduced a new system called Renderable, which in summary, gives us a better way of handling shadows and the z axis.  There’s been a lot of work behind-the-scenes on improving on / expanding this system further.  For example, we have added on to this system by giving objects a bouncing property.  There are a few updates that are not quite yet done, but it’s progressing well nonetheless.

We mentioned earlier in this post that there were updates we had to make for the bow to work properly.  For as long as the bow-and-arrow mechanic have been in the game, walking / running while holding the bow has always been a still image.  This worked fine for prototyping purposes.  Once the pull-back the bow string animation is complete, the object goes into a hold state of the bow until the arrow is released.  With our current system we can be in a stand, walking or running state while holding the bow, and the new animations work great!

However there was one problem with the current system — the pull-back of the bow string animation.  This animation is about a second long, which without moving the feet, made our hero seem like he was floating.  We did not want to remove the mechanic of being able to walk / run while equipping (i.e. the bow string animation), and we did not want to add a pull-back animation for each different combinations of walking / running directions we could do.  Therefore, we got creative with the animation and decided to shuffle the feet when doing the pull-back of the bow string animation.  This seemed to solve the problem for the most part, and works well with transitioning into the walk / run while holding bow animations!

The rest of the updates, including the updates to the bow animations, are pretty simple and can be summarized in a quick bulleted list:

• We updated our soldier enemies to account for the new bow animations.  Mostly, we wanted to make sure that once a soldier enemy had committed to telegraphing which direction they were facing to shoot, that they couldn’t change directions until the animation had played out completely.
• Speaking of telegraphing animations, we finally got around to updating the soldier enemy to telegraph its attacks.  This essentially amounts to pausing on a specific wind up frame for a given amount of time (easier enemies pause longer than harder enemies).
• Last time we also mentioned how we allow the player to merge anywhere instead of going back to the town to merge weapons.  This new feature is great, but was definitely becoming a tedious chore after a while.  Therefore, by pressing a button in the inventory screen, we can simply “auto merge” our weapons to automatically rank them up!
• Finally, we’ve had our hero be able to pickup and throw things for a while.  However, we also needed the ability to set objects back down without them breaking (so we can do the infamous set an object on a switch puzzle).  We updated the holdable system so that they can be setback down (as well as concurrently getting the animations to make this look right at the same time!).