Hey everyone, Alpha 18 is on Steam Stable, and should be on Humble Bundle soon! The team is now a full two days into Alpha 19 development, which we anticipate will revisit Rayya’s Children. In the meantime, let’s spend this week’s Desktop Tuesday looking at the various animation projects that Matt Malley has been working on, the fruit of some of which you can already see in Alpha 18!
Enhancing Animations
Recap from the video:
- Malley joined our team last June! Unlike the rest of us, he has professional experience as a 3D artist and animator, so we immediately threw him at our animation backlog.
- It was his first time using our animation program of choice, 3D Studio Max, so idles seemed like a good place to start: they add flavor to the world, inner life to the hearthlings, and they don’t interact with any other objects in the world the way carry, combat, eating, and sleeping animations do.
- Malley asked us to help him brainstorm good idles, and we came up with a huge list that included things like tapping feet and counting fingers.
- Some volunteers from around the office acted them out in front of a camera, so he could work from life references.
- These new animations have a ton more detail than our old ones; Malley’s actually studied this stuff! This expresses itself in a ton of keyframes; our old animations would have four or five; these new ones have dozens. We’re really excited about them, especially with the way they make you think about what the hearthlings themselves are thinking.
- After working on a few idles, Malley realized that finishing the whole brainstorm list might not be the best use of his time, as idles only play when the hearthlings are idle. Wouldn’t we all rather see animations that contributed to more active hearthling activities?
- He hit on the idea of making idles that could also be re-combined and re-used in other situations or for future features, basically like a bank of useful animations.
- He made a giant spreadsheet. Animations that could be used in lots of future contexts, like finger pointing and applause, got priority. Animations that were very specific, like singing or dancing, got low priority.
- And that exercise is where these other animations come from: Brow Wipe, Complete, Concerned, Reserved, Tool Inspection.
- Right now they play as idles, and can make sense as such, but you could also imagine crafters doing them before or after the craft animation, or workers after helping out with building.
- The rest of this work should happen in a future Alpha, but animations can take a long time, so it’s useful to have a bank of them.
- While adding new idles, Malley has also been updating old animations that he felt could use a bit more oompf. The Yawn, animation, for example, has recently received an update. It’s now 100% more likely to make me want to yawn too, while I’m watching it!
- The varanus also got an update. If you watch the old varanus animation, you can see that when he’s walking, his feet don’t really match up, and his whole body wiggles from side to side. When he attacks, his whole body sort of curves smoothly into the head butt.
- This is very cute, but when Malley was redoing the varanus rig to support other, similarly shaped monsters, he wanted to give the critter a bit more menace, solidity, and mass.
- In the new animation you can see clearly that his walking stride is much more realistically like a lizard’s, with an invisible upper arm moving the lower legs as a croccodile would. And instead of curving his whole body left and right, his eyes now stay focused forward, even though his tail still moves to counterbalance his weight, because he’s hunting
- The new headbutt gives the creature a greater sense of weight in his hips, and there’s a tangible impact and recoil when he snaps forward. It’s fast and snappy and startling, just like an attack should be.
- Malley has a lot more animation related projects lined up, many of which should make future animations much simpler.
- For example, most of the models in the game do not have a rig, which is a system that dictates where all the bones of a model should be at rest. If you make a mistake in a model with a rig, you can set the bones back to their default state, and start over. Without a rig, setting all the pieces back to default puts them all in a pile at the origin, which means starting over takes forever.
- Rigs also allow for references, which allows for changes to be made to the bones and automagically out to all animations. Right now, when we need to change a bone or a joint on a model, every animation must be updated.
- Malley is looking at timesavers like this, so that it will be easier than ever to make new animations quickly for all the inhabitants of Hearth.
How about you? Are there any animations you’d like to see in the game, either as idles or as part of other behaviors?
Other Announcements
Streams should happen as usual this week!
Also, we are happy to announce that this week, Team Stonehearth adds a full time game designer, Richard Hough! Richard is a kickstarter backer who comes to us from Phoenix Labs. In addition to Stonehearth and others in its genre, he loves playing all kinds of games; in our many conversations we have not yet hit upon a Stonehearth-relevant game that he has NOT played. We have lots of projects lined up for Richard, and we look forward to having his help as we all make Stonehearth as sticky and enjoyable as it is beautiful and intricate. Come by on stream tonight to say hi to him!