Character Animation Progress (Patreon)

Hi there!

Anna here. As you may already now, I am working together with Alice on the roots of our animation system. It's a very big task for a lifesim game like Paralives as it requires a lot of animations. Usually, we like to do development diaries to show you the work we've been doing in the background after a video, explaining more technical insights of what we've been up to. I did one about the astronomy system after the Day and Night Cycle video, which you seemed to have really enjoyed! (thank you!! <3)

However, even if we've been working on the animations for a few months now, it's still early to show anything final, as we're still on preliminary phases of design and implementation. We're still going to be at it for a while, animations are really a core system!

For your eyes only (please don't share!), here's a sneak peek at some recent animations that have been included into the game and are being tested on our poor Charlie:

Can you guess what Charlie is doing in each of these images?

Here is also a summary of what we've been meaning as "animation system" and what I've been working on lately:

• Layering system: To combine part of an animation with part of another, like sitting + drinking
• Procedural system: To adapt an animation to its environment or height of the character without having to make hundreds of animations for each action
• Locomotion system: To adapt an animation to the character's position and rotation in the world, when climbing stairs for example
• Action and interaction system: To link animations to chunks of actions, and actions to a single interaction: "eat burger" interaction is actually divided into background invisible actions like "go to table", "start eat animation", "play eating animation in a loop", "transition to idle animation when finished".

Another challenge for us is to make each of these animation features accessible to modders. This will allow animators to add their own animations to the game and share them as mods on Steam Workshop.

A week with a Paralives developer

As we're currently a bit slow on releasing videos (which doesn't mean that the development slowed down!), I feel like more behind-the-scenes would be a cool thing for the public to follow, even if it's not polished or even fully tested yet. This is the reason why I'd like to try a new format for behind the scenes, which will happen on my (Anna's) twitter account, next week. I call this ✨A week with a Paralives dev!✨ I'll explain my current struggles there and talk about the "typical" day-to-day tasks or problems I have to face in the making of a robust animation system for our game. I hope you will like it!

With that said, even if it's going to happen on my Twitter account instead of here, don't hesitate to ask questions (about animations) in here during the week! There will be a whole day (next Friday) where I'll try my best to answer some of them. A summary of this week of tweets will be available in a future public Patreon post too! There will also definitely be a more standard development diary on Patreon when we're done putting the basic bricks on this wonderful simulation wall (oh boy am I looking forward to this moment!).

Anna

PS: As a last bonus for Patrons only, here is our (cat)walk cycle test environment.
As always, it's still a work in progress. If the GIF doesn't work, click this link.