2 weeks remain - animation animation animation

With less than 2 weeks left, I should be looking at putting some polishing touches on this game, but am instead running circles around the ball, both metophorically, and in some cases, that's what the actual player is doing.

I'm making progress, and at some point, I would have had to do what I'm doing if I wanted a complete game, I guess I figured I wouldn't need to go through this hassle in the 12 week project part.  On paper, the game seems to have changed in very small ways the last 5 weeks, possibly going backwards in some ways.  But I had reached the abosolute limit of my hacky animation controller, and it was taking me hours to make a small change, because it would break something else in the process.

OK, so the things I've been up against recently:

• Animation.  At one point this was a simple little thing, that just needed slight tweaking to finalise, at least in my mind.  A better way to actually look at it, it is a monster.  Unity and Mixamo kicked my ass for a good few days.  There is generic model/animation and humanoid model/animation in Unity.  By default the Mixamo stuff comes out generic, but that doesn't work well with Unity transforms.  Google helped me realise I needed to change it to Humanoid, but that just plain didn't animate.  The answer alluded me brilliantly, you need to find the base avatar, set that Humanoid, then change every animation.  Next, the animations now work, but look rediculous, like when running, the animation itself looks great, but when rigged to a humanoid avatar, limbs just go in weird directions, making it look like they are in the process of turning, when they are going dead straight.  I have no idea how I resolved this, but I had 50 attempts before something just worked.  And apart from that, I found the more animations I got, the more complex and buggy the Animator became.  It's frustrating debugging the animator, seeing the flag to start jumping is set, and the animator is completely ignoring it, when the only thing I've set is to jump when that flag is true.  This just went through a complete overhaul.  I've now ripped the entire original controller out, and replaced the animations with sub states, where the main state is either idle, moving, jumping, bumping, spoiling, but under each of those, there are substates, so under moving there is running, walking, running backwards, etc.  This works well, and whats more, adding another animation is childs play now.  In terms of content, I've worked through a few types of marking, I've added bumping and walking.  Animation is not complete, but it's definitely in the best place it's been for a while.
• I also finally managed to get some colour on my characters.  I heard an interesting comment about game design, and saying it's easier to get excited about a project if it's looking good.  That is it's all well and good to say you should be able to make the controls and physics work while the characters are just cubes, but it's easier to get excited about it if they look like Aussie Rules players.  I had no idea how I was going to do this, but Adobe stepped in for me with a free preview tool called Fuse.  Fuse allows you to define a look for a 3D character, from skin, to hair, to body shape, to clothes.  I used this to get a sort of Aussie Rules type clothing, but there is no colour editing in that tool.  The final edit was a little hacky, each clothing is an object, but has several files to render it, some for the mesh, some for the material qualities.  I opened the diffuse map in paint.net, reworked the key areas to be like teams tops, shorts and socks, and now have proper looking players.  Not perfect, but not bad at all.

So, I'm up against it for time now.  A lot of things seem to be on the too hard list now, and just getting a non-buggy gameplay could possibly soak up most of the remaining time.  There is no point backing down though, I am going to push hard this next week and a half, and just see how much I can squeeze into it.  With a little luck, I can get a decent product up and running, and have my solid base to work from.

So things to look at this week:

• Finalise the bumping, spoiling and marking.  This will not be perfect, but I have to call it quits somewhere, and it at least has to have bumping and some level of marking/dropping a ball.  Spoiling doesn't have a good animation, but again, I don't have time to learn 3D animation creation, so I have to work with what I have.
• Finalise the decision making of the defenders
• Organise the player positions at the start of every play
• Finalise camera positions

Nice to haves if I can squeeze out a couple more hours:

• Umpires and crowd
• Noises
• Music
• Settings (eg. sound on/off, less graphics for older phones)

The list of things I'm not going to attempt by next week is too big to bother listing, but it's essentially down to getting a solid base by next week, and then I'll try to look back and re-assess everything that I've done.  I have to then look at what other projects I want to play around with next (the list is growing), and whether there is enough in this product to bother continuing with, or whether to just put this down as a learning project.