Shot One Windows, XONE, PS4, Switch game

We've been busy the last few weeks, as we are aiming to head to our first convention in January (PAX South) we are all busy getting everything done for our vertical slice. There's multiple systems being built, so let's cut to the chase.

First of all we have our animators on fulltime duty working on character select, in game and outro system work. We were inspired by fighting games for the character select so we want to have very expressive, animated selects for our available characters (Vlad and Volley for vertical slice). This example shows off Volley in engine with her entry animation and active state (With the thumb towards her).

We're also building our hype system at the moment, which is basically an ultimate system with a charge bar that the players will be able to trigger. The bar will charge passively with time or certain actions and skill shots will boost the bar so they can execute certain attacks. We mocked up a few ideas for how to signal to the players that their bar was active. There's a lot going on in the game so visual read is important. People really seemed to like B when we polled some of our followers on Twitter. Our coder Phil Blank is working atm on integrating the hype system into engine and it should be done in a few days so we can start an art pass.

We had a lot of discussion regarding ideas and we decided that Volley's Hype Move will be called 'Bunker Buster,' an offensive move with crazy knockback that will be difficult to intercept. The majority of other characters will have more utility based moves that might be more technical. Volley is an easily accessible character so we didn't want to complicate her mechanics. I mocked up the visual target by hand animating it, a practice we do that helps sell the team on certain concepts. A gif like this will help animators, coders and VFX all have a reference target to aim for.

The Hype system will be triggered via entering a charging state when the disc is in mid air. We recently wrapped up work on animations for Volley for this state. Most of our animation stuff was in proxy/block in but the animators have been going at it refining these.

Vlad's animations were all first pass so our lead animator Andrew Helenek is currently going back and refining his full animation set (About 60 or so unique animations give or take). This work in progress is an example of a Run state --> Dash state --> Recovery back to run state. A lot of attention needs to be paid to blending.

Last but not least our new animators Jen and Tyson are at work on outro animations for our characters. We absolutely love what Overwatch was able to do with their Hero Highlight system, so we're taking inspiration. We built a dome in Unity in which these animations trigger post match, but as you can see we still need some work on the lighting and rendering front. This GIF featuring volley is our first working example, with a test animation and UI elements.

So yeah! Quite an art heavy update but that's the majority of it at the moment. We're all working hard and having a lot of fun. Look forward to hopefully sharing some music/audio stuff that's in the works soon. Thank you for checking this second devlog and we hoped you like it! For more day to day updates, Follow Our Shot One Twitter! Cheers.