Suzy Cube Update: Friday, September 18, 2015

#suzycube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

This week has been all about the boss monster redesign. Got it modelled up, textured, rigged and even got started on the animation!

The big reason for the redesign was that the original rig just wasn't working out and was much too unruly. Once I had decided that it would be best to redo the character to have less body segments and to be proportionally bigger next to Suzy, I decided to redesign it since I wasn't satisfied with the original look anyway.

By cutting down on the body segments and getting rid of the spikes, I was actually able to put much more detail into the head while keeping the character's overall vertex count much lower than the old design! Win-win!

Another big difference compared to the old model is that I decided to forget about using blend shapes since the facial animations are so simple anyway. So this new version simply has three brow joints which I can play with to bring life to the eyes. It's working out well so far! And the ability to basically grab the brow and move it in the viewport feels nice and organic to work with.

Animating this thing's been fun. The rig is a simple IK chain with a controller at the head, so it's kind of like animating a character that's just one big arm. In fact, I've been acting out motions all week using my arm like a naked sock puppet. So far, I'm about half way through the list of animations, so I don't expect to get around to implementing the boss fight logic in game until late next week at the very earliest. There are a lot of animations to do because I want to leverage the rig and model one hundred percent, which is why all five boss fights in the game will feature a variation of this same character. To keep things fresh, though, it means making sure it has a large variety of actions and attacks available to mix and match between encounters. And that means, animation!

So, that's it for this week's update. Next week will, likely, be more of the same. Once I have the boss hooked up and working in game, I plan to write a nice meaty post about the implementation!

Until next time!