The morning and afternoon classes were dedicated to every group’s final presentations where all the tutors were present to see them. The feedback for ours was generally positive, but the main feedback was fixing textures since some textures don’t look like they match with the rest of the environment, and also populating the scene to feel less empty. Narratively, a suggestion was to include an interactable rocking chair where Red and Yang discuss the people of the town suddenly disappearing as the rocking chair still rocking shows it happened recently, as well as showing more festival related items in the town to show that a festival was taking place instead of just having the characters talking about it as a show-don’t-tell thing to the audience.

Another thing was having Yin actually joining in the fight and wandering around rather than just appearing and disappearing which was already suggested, and having Yang stop closer to Red so he appears more on camera rather than being barely in it and possibly having him walking up to her and sitting down when she stops walking, but this depends on how much time we have left before the game needs submitted. I mentioned in my section of the presentation I needed to fix the wolf rigs using Advanced Skeleton in order to fix the animations, so it should make these additional animations easier to do if I do end up doing them since the rigs won’t be fighting with me and looking odd when animating complex movement.

I downloaded Advanced Skeleton and made a start on fixing the Yin rig using the following tutorial:

Although a short tutorial, it was still beneficial to understand how to use it correctly despite some settings not quite being the same due to the one I downloaded being the most recent version, but this didn’t affect me building the rig. The only thing the tutorial went into that was thoroughly outdated was creating a skin cage after building the rig in order to have the mesh move with the joints, but when I tried I had to do an additional step since the video did it automatically when the “Create” button under “SkinCage” in the “Deform” menu was pressed but I had to select the mesh and hit “Copy weights” in order to have the skin cage weights transfer to the actual mesh. In the end I decided to forego the skin cage since the skin weights were still looking a bit dodgy (most likely due to the chest fur and leg fur since the skin cage likely didn’t register them as being parts of the chest and legs as FitSkeleton rig only has the default quadruped features (forelegs, backlegs, tail, etc) found in all quadrupeds), so I just decided to paint the skin weights at a later time since I wanted to focus on doing more final boss animations this week.

During the weekly group call, I gave a list of the boss animations I was considering to do and asked if any additional ones were needed. They said no, but for the swipe attacks I was told to make sure there’s enough time for the player to know what attack is coming, like having the arm raised a bit before attacking, so they have enough time to react and dodge. For the phase 2 spin attack, they proposed having an alternate one where arms are raised as a visual indicator of what projectiles are gonna be shooting out of the head as the one where the arms aren’t raised will probably just be shooting something like rocks and the one with the arms raised will shoot something else. With that settled, the rest of the boss animations are the boss’s first appearance, idle, phase 1 swipe and alt swipe for variety, phase 2 hand thump, phase 2 spin and alt spin, and phase 2 eye beam since I had already completed the phase 1 spin, dizzy with and without hit reactions and death animations last week.

I started working on more final boss animations this week which are the idle, swipe and alt swipe for the rest of the phase 1 attacks, eye beam which is a phase 2 attack, and the boss’s first appearance.

The idle animation is shown below:

The intent for the idle is something for each animation where the boss attacks to smoothly transition to and from so the movements are smooth during the boss fight. The reference used for the idle was the Squizzard boss from Super Mario Galaxy 2 (1:35 to 1:39):

I wanted the boss to look like its breathing by giving its arms subtle up and down movements along with the head similar to Squizzard’s idle, and I like how the idle animation came out.

The swipe and alt swipe animations are shown below:

The idea for the swipe and alt swipe is to have two different versions of a swipe attack the boss could do for variation, which would keep the player on their toes since the boss could either do one swipe or two and the player has to pay attention to the visual cues of the arms raising in anticipation. The reference I used was from the enemies which have a sword and shield from Spyro: Reignited Trilogy since the swiping of the sword is similar to how I wanted the boss’s arms to swipe (1:19 to 1:22):

I love both swipe attacks and the way the anticipation is shown before the hands come down in the swiping motion since it gives the player enough time to react before the arms come down.

The eye beam animation is shown below:

The idea is to replace the swipe and alt swipe attacks for phase 2 with the eye beam attack and the planned hand thump attack since phase 2 attacks would deal more damage to the player due to the boss being angrier at having its health so low from the player attacking it. This was something I couldn’t actually find an exact reference for, the closest thing was Robo Patrick shooting projectiles from his mouth as he leans his head forward (2:48 to 2:56):

The eye beam attack turned out quite well. Although the actual beam itself isn’t there since it’ll be a particle effect in Unreal Engine, the movement still conveys what the actual attack is.

The boss’s first appearance animation is shown below:

The idea is to have it for a cutscene similar to the night world transition Holly made when the player first enters the night world where the boss comes out from under the fountain, looks around and spots the player, then raises its hands in a roar before the boss battle actually starts. The reference I used was once again the Squizzard boss fight from Super Mario Galaxy 2 (1:30 to 1:35):

This reference shows Squizzard coming up from the ground with its arms raised before shaking its head and attacking the player, which is something similar to what I did where instead of my boss shaking its head, it looks around a bit. I enjoy the way I made the head look like it’s stretching when it first comes up before squashing when it lands before going back to the original position, and the way it looks like the boss is confused where the player is until it sees them.

I made some great progress with the animations over the week since I only have a few more left to do, which are the phase 2 hand thump, phase 2 spin and alt spin which I will do next week.

References Of The Week