The Developer's Blog

Recording some thoughts of Nathan Lydick

Introduction

A continuation of the introduction to the YAML format describing the skills used by the creatures in game. This post provides an example of the workflow for creating the file describing a skill.

Workflow:

  1. Pick Attack
Stomp:
  1. Pick Animation for the Attack. It is not necess...

What is needed to define a skill or technique or attack that a creature in a video game can do? Basically, a skill is a sequence of animations and movement to apply to the character at some cost, together with the (visual, sound, etc.) effects to produce, as well as info about the damage and statuses to inflict, and the hitbox over which it applies.

A utility class to handle weighted blending of values, created for use in my transition to data-driven animations rather than hard-coded ones. A Blendable<T> is just a wrapper around a T value and a float weight with some convenience functions to allow blending between them and applying the value from a starting point (the default animation pose, if you will).

A Semi-Procedural Animation Project

Starting in late spring 2020, I've been working on a procedural animation system. You can see a video from about 6 months into it here, at which point I thought it has reached a stage where it's nice enough to make a video showing it.