#rocket basebrawl

Hey everyone, the local Egg is checking in to show off some progress. Last time after working on some important rendering effects, I also started on other in-game effects. As promised, here are some results!

First I have the Shader in the works for the swing effect that will add a bit of subtle uniqueness in each swing, as fast as they may end up being, it will cut down on the monotony.

Here we have the first rendition of the swing effect, just a few preview swings to show off just what I mean.

I also worked on a secondary and tertiary swing effect with some minor differences in how the shader works and which textures were added to make things feel a bit different.

For all three swings, they are a series of layered particle effects, a primary swing effect, a secondary swing effect both and a simple black particle with similar settings to give the illusion of an outline which will link nicely with the custom renderer for non-particle objects.

In addition to this, I also created matching on-hit effects for the swings, yet again a series of particle effects grouped together.

So, that’s all for this week!

hello everybod(egg)y, your local hardboiled gamer coming at ya with some progress on the project that was mentioned last week! Now that I’ve got something more substantial, I can tell you that it’s a sports game with a twist called Rocket Basebrawl!

So, this week I went into some beta character prototyping for the game, featuring the base design for two of the game’s teams as seen above.

Here we have the characters loaded into Unity as the team’s engine of choice. I have few close-ups of the current model with the desired effects added to it for you to have a look at!

So what exactly is it that’s going on here? Well, first and foremost I sorted out some basic textures for our models, and I’m using an unlit shader graph with several effects attached to it that give it the ability to respond to light while retaining the hard edges that we need for our desired style.

I’ve also looked into a post-processing effect to retain the outline across the board. There are some more things to iron out before I’ll be ready to show you some more progress on that!

Alright, so we’ve finally ended work for the project ‘Rocket Basebrawl’, at least for the foreseeable future, and I find myself lacking in regrets about it. Would I have liked to do more with it? Absolutely, however, the point that it has reached does fill me with some measure of confidence regarding the future I may have in gamedev, as well as some direction to where I can take my studies further.

The team has reached a decision that Rocket Basebrawl won’t be fully publicly released until it is in a more complete state, or otherwise fully updated to the height of our concept, and there’s also the chance it won’t be publicly released for some time, if at all. I was fine with that in all honesty, its a student game made by just three people within six months, it’d be a bit too much to expect a fully fleshed out game given the breadth of the concept we agreed on within that time, but I’m glad we scaled back appropriately for our assignment, and I’m even happier that it was agreed upon early. All in all, I feel good!

Anywho, I’ll likely be showing off some stuff here on this blog in the future, just small projects with things here and there, but not a big project like RBB at least for a while

It’s been a while since the project started, and we’re nearing ever closer to the time of initial release; I’ve shown a lot of what I’ve done, even though admittedly I wasn’t super great about the dev-blogging process. I don’t hold it against myself very much though; its all in the name of learning. Still, I’ve had fun, and the next post you’ll see from me will be about release; and have a post-mortem thoughts included!

So we’re finally here, at the point where I can showcase with confidence; the player character’s animations! See, I had to put a lot of focus into this one for multiple reasons; namely being that it was the one the player would control, but to also expand my skill set, my perspective on animating a player character, which was something I kind of dreaded in some ways, but was always excited to eventually get to doing. Without further ado, here he is; Rocket Basebrawl’s player character!

This idle animation is, as I’ve said, the basis for the Cheetah fielders idle animations, though of course the motion here is different in that I’m accounting for two things; the character is excited and ready to move, and they’re holding a jet propelled bat.

Here we have two perspectives of the running animation; I wanted to nail this one in particular as I’ve mentioned before, and I feel like I’ve definitely achieved that task, I’ve referenced cheetah movement physics while also keeping in mind that this character is bipedal and an extreme athlete

Next up is the standing swing animation, a simple swipe ready to go and knock stuff straight outta the park!

This one, on the other hand, is a bit more interesting, it’s intent is to account for the player moving and also batting, so I went with a sort of ‘blend’ and mix between the two with a light sliding feel

and speaking of slides, could I really justify not having a baseball slide as part of the animation set? Absolutely not; I had to have this too; this is our stand in for a dashing animation!

In addition to sliding, I’ve also got a funny spin move, it looks a bit janky on its own, I will admit to that, but it’s another one that shines more in-game with the context of the other animations. Essentially, the idea here is if the player is dashing while batting, this animation would trigger, as you can see the character extends the arm that’ll have the bat in it outwards to link into this.

Finally, we have the taunting animation; I first had a ‘come and get me’ sort of gesture going initially as in a prior post; but that felt weird to have such minimal movement, the character’s personality isn’t exactly fitting of the ‘come and get me’ gesture, rather than inviting a challenge in that way, they are more of an impatient and speedy character, so giving them an animation that says ‘hey, I’m bored, you’re boring me; get faster’ instead, is something that held more significance; as I also had the bat that they would wield in mind.

For now, this may be my last pre-release post with content to show, the next few posts will be related to assessment of the project and the release of the game.

Here we go, the Cheetah team has arrived with their animations!

Here we have a simple idle, it takes guidance from the player character’s idle animation, the difference being is this one wasn’t made with wielding the bat in mind, so the right arm’s motion was instead with the idea of being ready to throw a ball.

Much like the bunny team, this team has their initial throwing animation; something nice and simple, a good swing with a countermotion in the tail.

Their following ‘taunt’ levels of throwing incorporate different exaggerations of ‘speed’, for the first its a bit of stretch into squash

the second level has more secondary movement in the legs and the tail moves faster

the final level speaks for itself, it’s wicked quick as the theme of this team is their impressive speed; they employ jet engines into their theme after all!

Speaking of... Their pitcher has arrived! This gnarly dude has a whole metal jet structure on his pitching arm, a metal support glove on his left and a wilder style of fur, shown in both the tuft of fur over his face, bigger ‘bushier’ ears and more spiky hairstyling, hes also a little bit larger than his teammates. he also has a popped collar, for coolness points.

Here we have his idle animations, theyre intentionally similar to the other cheetah’s in that hes ‘ready and raring to go’, this is also assisted by the fact that he has an active jet engine clamped to his arm; and that thing is active so it’ll push itself up and forward completely if this guy isnt keeping it together.

Here we have his reaction to being taunted, smashing his fists together in response, showing that he really means business and that his team won’t take any snark lightly!

Finally, we his pitching animation, where the idea is that the engine revs up and goes into overdrive while he tries to reel it back before it blasts forward, the ball-holding hook on top of the arm’s mechanism shoots the ball at the player!

Next up, I’ll showcase the player character animations, so,

As I mentioned in an earlier post; due to some rigging issues, I had to redo the bunny team pitcher’s animations; so I took that time to make revisions, tweaks and add in more of the personality I had in mind!

First up, the idle animation, as I mentioned before, I wanted to add more of a personality to it. Given that this is a bunny/rabbit character, allowing them to do a little ‘bunny hop’ was fitting.

This is simply a remake of the original ‘introduction’ animation, more decisive movement and pauses in movement made this animation feel better, and convey its intent as a sort of challenging pose.

These of course are the pitcher’s throwing animations; the spring loaded cord arm being swung around before being launched was a big thing that I wanted to have; and having the arm be pulled back in a big fast spiral and have that one last ‘pop’ back into place gave the animation and character more power, I will say that there are possibly more tweaks to do with this one, but it is at least 95% there.

Next up I’m going to show off the Cheetah team, which I also had a lot of fun with!

As promised, here we have some particle effects work! It’s been a while since I showed off something regarding these since I was mostly doing animation and various rendering tasks in the meantime that were of a higher priority.

Here we have the prefab that contains the ball that the game would create once the player hits a ball; it was initially just a sphere with a trail renderer, but now it has bursting flames (to emulate a rocket burst), a trail to show where it was going and an expanding ring as well to emulate the idea of a ‘sonic boom’ effect so that the power of the players swing and the style of the game could be emboldened.

Here we have some extra particle effects intended to go on the leaderboard UI where one’s score and ball hit data would be displayed, the above particles would play when the badges for each ball hit would appear and stack on each other.

 These two are intended to display next to the numeric value of each ball type hit as well. I’ll be showing off the final animations for the game’s characters after this one now!