Crawling Under Things

Everyone starts on all fours and now TheMan is doing it again!

So in the game, where there are openings that require you to crawl through them - this is the animation sequence we'll be using.

Still loads of tweaking work to do, I've solved a huge number of combat transition issues - still finishing out combat/interaction transitions now.  After that, i'll need to work on restricting what interactions can be done from within 'combat' mode.

One change i've made is to disable combat mode during an interaction temporarily.  So for example, if you have a weapon in hand (combat mode) and start crawling - it will revert to the non-combat camera mode which lets you orbit TheMan and see around you.  After he gets back up, the camera switches back to combat mode and aligns you appropriately behind the shoulder.

Changing from combat <-> non-combat is nice at the moment, I'm pretty happy with how it quickly but smoothly rolls the camera back into combat position, here is what combat mode looks like right now:

That's only half the screen, but imagine the crosshairs just NE of his elbow, maybe just in the busted out portion of the concrete wall ahead of him in this case.  So it's sort of a quasi-fps view in that your still third person, but moving the mouse around also rotates TheMan to keep pointing in that direction.

I have thought about animating him so you can be running with the camera at his side and shoot to his left, animating the arm(s) out in that direction - but frankly it seems like a lot of pain to implement and one thing i like about 'combat mode' as it sits, is that it reduces your field of view and makes it desirable to want to switch between modes - non-combat for view space and exploration, combat for combat - as it should be.

My goal is to keep tweaking things and try to get a webplayer demo up on logicwell.com here soon, right now that's looking to be another week/end out.

Also have all the remaining animations for combat to get in place - rifle/shotgun, 2hd melee and 1hd melee.  Those should be a riot.  I have a lot of concept art to share coming up as well as a look at the first main "monster" in the game, conveniently called TheBeastie.  He looks awesome, but i'll save that for another post.