Posts Categorized: Animation

Faking 3D Perspective

September 18, 2015

Hey Wulvers …. Wulverites? Wulverines (spelled with a “U” so we can’t be sued)? Whatever. It’s Evan Doody here with another tech-art blog post! This time, I’m going to shed some light on how we add depth to our environments, mainly through the use of parallax. This effect has been used to add depth in games since the beginning…of time. According to Wikipedia, “Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.” Long story short, objects in the background move slower than the camera, and foreground objects move at a rate faster than the camera.

We like to setup our environment scenes with several parallax “layers” to give off the illusion of close, far, really far, and “I think I can see my house from here” far. To do this, we created a simple script which allows us to adjust the position of each layer based on the camera position in the scene. A problem arose, however when Mike presented me with the following object: 

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Character Interactions

July 23, 2015

Hey everybody! Evan Doody here again. It’s been quite some time since my last technical blog post and I wanted to share some of the things we have been working on.

Today I’m going to briefly talk about our double layered character skeletons. As you probably know from videos, images, or previous blog posts, we’re making a 2 dimensional game that moves in 3 dimensional space. One of the many, MANY, problems this causes will arise when two characters attempt to interact with each other. For a majority of the time, it’s not important for a player to be able to tell exactly which character is standing in front of another. The player and the enemies on screen rarely overlap or interact directly. This was not the case, however, when we introduced grappling.

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Where are all the Women?

September 29, 2014

Hello again!

We’ve received a comment or two recently about the lack of female characters in Wulverblade, so I wanted to address this here.  I also thought I’d give you a quick glimpse of 3 of our current female warriors :)

The only reason we’ve not shown them so far is for the same reason we’ve not shown 90% of the game, they’re simply not finished and thus not ready to be shown. You can see the creation process here from sketch > final character > select frames from the core attack sequence… (more…)

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Frame vs. Mesh Animations

August 19, 2014

Hey all,

Evan Doody back again, as promised! I would like to start by thanking everyone for all the positive feedback on my last post and for sharing that post as well. It means a lot to us here. For those of you joining us for the first time here on the Wulverblade Blog, welcome! Last time I covered one of our primary animation systems, 2D Skeletal animation. Today we continue down a similar path as I cover frame by frame animation, mesh based animation, and some methods of optimization. This post will be slightly more technical than the last one, so I will try to break things down to the best of my ability for all readers.

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Wulverblade Intro to Skeletal Animations

July 17, 2014

Hey all,

Evan Doody here with my first official blog post! This post has been a long time coming. With all of the exciting work going on and work left to do, blogging can quickly fall by the wayside. For that, we, the Wulverblade team, apologize.

I’m the team’s technical artist. It’s my job to make Mike’s art and our programming come together in wonderful ways. I also assist Mike with asset creation so he can focus his time where it’s needed most. With Mike busy capturing the majestic British landscape in extreme, stylized detail, the animations have fallen to me and our other animator Denis. The past few months I’ve been keeping my nose to the grindstone in our animation systems and thought it was about time share a glimpse of our process. Animations are a key aspect of the game’s combat experience and overall aesthetics. Due to the vast nature of this topic it’s easy for me to get sidetracked or start rambling so I will try to stay focus on the basics of the process.

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