Programming with Plumbo

My teammate Jon’s one request this week was a walk cycle. Having never animated a walk cycle in 3D before, I was unsure how big of an undertaking this would be. About four hours and three YouTube videos later, the character was rigged and walking! Blender makes it surprisingly easy to animate a humanoid character.

While the animation is a bit exaggerated in some areas and robotic in other areas, I think it is a good base for future walk cycles. Recently, I worked with Jon to integrate this and an idle animation into our player movement script. The result is much more natural gameplay. It’s starting to feel like a real game!

The animation comes alongside a proof of concept of multiple systems within the game. I modeled a basic initial scene for the game after much back and forth during the design process. Jon and Matthew have been busy developing a robust player movement system, while Bran has developed an initial shader.

Reflecting on where I was beginning this term, I have learned many new systems within Blender. This enables me to develop assets of a quality I wasn’t sure I’d be able to produce for our game in this short timeframe. Of course, the assets we have currently are a bit janky, but I am confident that if we are able to narrow the scope of assets and revisions that the team will need to produce, I will be able to build some pretty polished characters and scenes.

I’ve familiarized myself with our current code base and hope to contribute more to our C# scripts. I will likely handle scripts for object interactions and the animations I create. This will streamline the process of uploading and integrating assets.

Over break, I will be working with Bran to develop a texturing pipeline that will work with the shaders we are developing. I will also build a block-out of our entire Bunker scene so that we can get started on a rudimentary game loop. Exciting updates to come!