Ploxmons DevLog #19
- Animations and VFX
Hello everyone, a "few" days have passed since the last devlog - whoops. Today I can finally write another devlog presenting all the work that was done in the last week.
Animations
Animating our monsters in battle is an important step on our path to remove the staticness of the battle scene. Since animating monsters is a process that takes quite some time we were only able to animate a few of the monsters in the last year. To speed up this process we decided to split up the work which means that Michiil will from now on animate the missing mons. This week he was able to animate a few more mons which leads us to a total of 17 animated mons. There are still many mons and more important - bosses - misssing however we are on a good path to finish them in time.
Have a look at a view of the new animations here:
As you can see we have 3 animations for each Ploxmon:
1) Idle (the mon standing on the battlefield, simple breathing mostly)
2) play (when you play the mon on the battlefield it shows a unique expression)
3) hitted (when the Ploxmon gets attacked. Rude!)
As for most animations coming we needed to add a bit more artwork to the original artwork file (for example winking face, additional mouth, ...). Also the bodyparts needed to be seperated at first in order to animate them. Doint this kind of preparation for animations is a lot of work but needs to be done.
Here are some more animations of the other three starter Ploxmons:
VFX
The battle doesn't really feel right and interesting without some fancy visual effects. There are already some vfx for parts of the battle (for example for a few abilities) however most of them need some rework and many more are waiting to be added. In the last week I started tackling this issue and reworked most of the current vfx for abilties as well as added a bunch more for the missing abilities. Overall the look-and-feel of the vfx improved a lot and I am way more satisfied with the current state of the battle. There are still quite a few vfx missing for the abilities however I am confident that the missing ones can be added in the near future. We will show you a few of the ability vfx soon so stay tuned
Battle Scene
The third and most important task to make the battle more interesting and alive is the rework of the battle background. Last year I already started with this task which required a huge load of changes - both in game client as well as on server. This week I was able to finish a good amount of the open issues for example adding a nice transition between menu and game and fixing some issues in the vfx shaders that didn't work anymore with the new background-system. Currently we can't reveal more of this feature however you can be excited to experience the complete new look-and-feel of the battle scene in the near future.
Next steps
Overall the progress in the last week has been very good and I will be able to spend a good amount of time in the next week to fix more of the open issues. Additionally there are very few missing features waiting to be added which I will also tackle in the next weeks. Thanks for staying by after all this time! Stay safe and see you in the chat!
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>> Tldr Changelog
>> more Mon animations added
>> ability vfx reworked + more added
>> added scene transition between menu-battle
>> fixes in vfx shaders
>> overall bug fixes in battle scene
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