Blend Tree?

Total hours worked: 10 hours

This week is the finals week. I had to spend most of my time studying and taking the finals. The math final along took me 8 hours to complete. I did not have much time to work on the game itself. However, I did use the time I have to work on the animations within the game.

The first thing that I did is fixing existing bugs such as the player not being able to shoot and stuff. Also, our new enemy type needs to be textured.

From the feedback of our playtesters, we have received many complaints about the flow of our animation. It was too clunky and not easy to use. One of the biggest issues we had was that the shooting was not working as smoothly as we wanted it to be. That is why part of my task this week is to make the shooting feel more enjoyable.

The first approach to this problem was trying to implement the Blend Tree system to replace my original animation system. The reason for this is because BT offers a smooth transition between animations which is what we want for all of our animations. However, our input system restricts me from doing this.

BT allows the user to change the input which controls the transition from 1 animation to another. As this value gradually increase/decrease, it will switch between animations and this value comes from the movement control of the player. The problem with this is our movement control (self-implemented) gives either -1 or 1 and no value in between. This causes the transition time to be 0 and it just skips between animations. We tried Lerping(), manually changing the value, and even trying to re-design our movement but none of it worked. So as a result we changed it back to the original animation system.

Another thing that I completed this week with the help of Dawei (the person who implemented the melee enemy) is adding animation to the melee enemy. Since we can't use BT, we continued using the finite state machine.