Week 5 Personal Blog

For this week, as the team leader, outside of writing the team blog, although we didn't plan on having the animation for the first playtest, the group thought of that it won't be complete without the attack animation. Therefore starting off this week, I tried to push out the basic attack animation as soon as possible. I started with watching reference from the previous week, however, I wanted to improve on top of that and make it feels more native to the character. Therefore, I watched a lot of animation for other games and tried to act out the animations I wanted. Animation didn't go as smooth as I wanted, it took me hours and hours just to do 10 seconds of the animation. There were also problems with the IK controller and the feet not attaching to each other. Although it is not perfect, I was able to push out a basic animation just for this playtest. Personally, I was not happy with the animation, therefore, I am planning on redoing it in the next week. After completing the animation, I focused on directing the team members by having a private meeting with each individual on both environment and the programming part. Outside of those, I worked on doing play tests with multiple individuals and wrote down their valuable feedback.

As for personal reflection, the animation takes way longer than I expected, I basically found out a huge hole that we dug for ourselves when thinking of creating an action RPG, since if the animation is not smooth the game is basically unplayable. Currently, I am the only one working on the character animation since we have a lot of other models and effects needs to be done, but hopefully, we will be able to pull through.

As for the team, I am pretty happy with our progress this week. However, I might need other's help on animating.