Week 3 - Keep Rolling

Picking right up from last week, I added in the extra animation for moving forward during the neutral jump state. While at first I had assumed this would be a very simple task, after reviewing the game I found that the specifics of when this animation played were a bit tricky. I'll go over those in a second, but here's what we got working:

There's a little hitch with the animation when it swaps over from the jump to fall state, but that's something I'll deal with later. Now, in the source game this animation starts playing when you perform a neutral jump and then start moving forward. That part is just as simple as it sounds, but what took a minute to figure out was what caused it to transition back to the normal jump animation, because I found that frequently in testing, after entering this "forward jump" animation, Samus would simply stay in that state even after I stopped moving forward. turns out there are a handful of requirements. First and most obvious is that the player has stopped forward movement. The second is also pretty straight-forward; the player cannot be firing or charging their beam. The third one was what took some experimentation; the player only transitions back to the normal jump animation if the player is holding down the jump button when they release the d-pad. A bit weird in my opinion, but I coded that bit in all the same. 

After this, I went to work setting up the crouching and morphball states. Nothing too complicated here, except that I added in functionality to change the size of the player's hitbox when they enter/exit a given state.

We got through our main tasks for the week pretty quickly, so I moved on to a bit of clean up to round things out. First of all, I went through my scripts and removed any hard-coded strings for things like state names and animations, and instead set up a bunch of constant variables in a global class. easier to keep track of, easier to change something if I need to. Next I went through my animation tree and turned all my states into blend trees so that I didn't need separate nodes for the left and right version of each animation.  While I was doing that, I learned something rather handy; I don't need to have states connected in the animation tree unless I want them to automatically transition from one to another. Those two adjustments cleaned things up quite considerably, here's the before and after:

The blend states also have the added bonus of helping prep for my next big undertaking; directional aiming. Each animation is currently set up to take a facing direction and a vertical aim value, and I already switched up my input logic in code to include the vertical axis when I implemented crouching/morphball. Theoretically it should just be a matter of turning the input into an aim value, and then slotting in the different animation variations, but.... we'll see just how smoothly that part goes. There are alot of animations for me to plug in here after all. In any case, a pretty productive week I'd say, let's hope the momentum I'm gaining here keeps going strong.

See you next time.