Game Dev Diary 4: Humans and zombies (kind of)
25 Jan 2018
In my last post I learned the steps involved in creating a 3D scene in Blender. Now that I felt I had a reasonable grasp on 3d modeling (at least enough to create something I could work with) I was eager to start working on the game itself. Since my last post, I have created a new character model, this time with a number of different animations and tested them out in Unity.
Game Design
I want the survival aspect of the game to take many forms; survival from zombies of some kind, survival from other humans, and survival from a hostile environment. But to begin with, I thought I’d start with the zombies, as they will likely be the main focus of the combat and navigation mechanics.
Animating Humans and Zombies
The first thing I needed for the game was a character model. As I showed in a previous post I created a character model already, though that one was a copy of the model the tutorial was demonstrating and I wanted something a little different. As a first character model for my game I wanted something very simple, without any details or texturing, and something which could be used for both the human characters and the zombie characters, a placeholder for future more detailed models.
In order to experiment with different mechanics, I needed this model to have a few typical animations. The animations too didn’t have to be particularly detailed, just enough that you could identify whether characters in the game were humans or zombies and what they were doing.
For this character model I followed the same tutorials which I used in my post on 3D modeling in Blender. Though this time I used them for as a reference rather than a step by step guide. I still followed the general steps of the modeling process, though I made this character simpler and more cartoonish and generic. Doing my own animations was tough, but I felt by the end I was starting to get the hang of it, even if all my animations were very basic.
The first animation I did was a walk animation cycle for the human character; this was pretty straightforward as I pretty closely followed the poses of the walk animation from the tutorial.
Next, I did a run animation cycle for the human character. This was a bit trickier; I was able to use the poses from the walk animation as a guide but I had to figure out what those poses should be for a run cycle. It was also a lot of fun, slow-motion running around my house enacting the animation in order to figure out the poses.
After that, I did a walk animation cycle for the zombie character. For this one I cheated a little, I based the poses off of the human walk cycle but made the feet drag rather than lift, and raised the arms forward. I also shifted certain poses so that the movement seemed staggered rather than smooth.
I also created idle, attack and death animations for the human character and zombie character. Though I made a bit of a mistake with the death animations, because I didn’t disable the inverse kinematics on the feet of the model, the feet ended up in some strange positions.
What’s Next
For my next task, I’m going to start writing some code, I’m going to create an RTS camera controller for Unity so I can navigate the game world better.