Steve's been working on getting new animation done for a while now. He's got a mostly complete set of animation cycles for our first male bruiser. He still need to do poses with different types of weapons, and some cycles that won’t find themselves into our first level. For the moment he's taking a break from our beefy dude, and concentrating on getting all existing cycles done for a fierce female bruiser.
There’s actually some additional combat stuff that’s been done that you still haven’t been able to see. We've got animation for putting people in, attacking while in, and throwing from headlocks. We’ve got animations for attacking people that have been knocked down, and some revisions on almost all of the cycles that were in old videos of the game. We’ve hesitated to show off any of these cycles, as after kicking off swapable facial features, the Bruisers look kind of odd as faceless/bald templates. But hey, that’s part of the fun "behind the scenes" sort of stuff that you just won’t get to see unless we show it, right?
We’re up to 42 cycles done for the dude right now, with another 19 expected to go, not including any special ways to die. It’s enough animation that we can iron out the gameplay as soon as Matt is able to finish his revisions to the engine. As mentioned above though, Steve's now pursuing animation for our first female bruiser archetype. She’s actually gone through a few variations since her first incarnation:
As you can see, the color scheme was originally quite limited. We realized while doing the promotional illustration that the way Steve was designing all the other characters, was with color on top, and a complement on the bottom. Since we’re color coding teams, it made sense to do this, especially since in levels like our first one (the oil sands), characters will likely have their lower bodies obscured.
Aside from that, the black color of the leather made it very difficult to read against the dark colors of the oil in our first level. So the design has been revised a bit to a color scheme that works better.
And of course, we still have the eyeless, bald versions that Steve's actually animating with:
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