hopooo: DevBlog #4 - Item DisplaysHey guys, Paul “Paulthegoat” here. One of the most sat
hopooo: DevBlog #4 - Item DisplaysHey guys, Paul “Paulthegoat” here. One of the most satisfying and fun aspects in Risk of Rain was watching your small character transform over the course of the game into a spinning ball of death. Showing each of these items on the player character as you collected them was very important to the feel of the game. Doing so served two key purposes.First, some items weren’t inherently obvious what power up they gave right when you found them (Ukulele). This was an issue for newer players to be able to easily pick up the game and get a grasp on what exactly was going on. And secondly, showing the player’s progress as they became stronger over time. Given the tools we had, I felt we did a pretty good job doing this in 2D. However, with our wider 3d design space, we have much more room to work with.For Risk of Rain 2, we designed a new system to help us scale placing items and so far it has been working out great. On each character there is an Armature that contains all of the bones for that particular model. A few of the most common bones for a player character like the Commando would be the head, chest, stomach, arms, legs etc. All of these main bones contain subsequent smaller bones that can be used to fine tune each item placement and animations. For example, the UpperArmL > LowerArmL > HandL > and a bone for each finger on the left hand. Using an “item display rule set” we are able to assign each item that you pick up to be attached to specific bones at exact sizes and angles that look best at. Once we have the character model set up, adding a new item is simple thanks to the item display rule set system. We just pick what bone to attach the item to and set the scale/rotation. We can even choose to have limb replacements for certain items that make sense. We currently have the Paul’s Goat Hoof replacing the right calf when picked up. Every character (monsters and players) can have a unique item display rule set. An important note is that currently, stacks of items do not display repeatedly on your body. While that was a goal at the beginning, in reality some items (syringe, tooth, etc) could naturally stack to ridiculous amounts but larger items (ukulele, behemoth, limb replacements) couldn’t be stacked visually within reason. We’re hoping to think of something clever along development to make sure that stacks of items still feel much stronger than having just one.-Paul -- source link