Hello everyone! I’m Alex, one of the programmers who’s been doing a lot of work with our player model along with Jacob Y! Our player is wacky, wavy, but most importantly, a pain in the butt and it took a lot of time to get them to behave the way we wanted. We’re still making updates as the game progresses, but the growth we made is one of the more interesting aspects of our game!
It all started with the most exciting step: research. Hooray. We had no idea how a player like this even worked when we started this project, so we did a lot of research trying to figure out what they even were. The term we were looking for was Active Ragdoll, which means a player that reacts to physics and collisions while still playing animations. There were a few tutorials online, but most of them were not precise enough to do what we wanted. We knew early on that the player would need to grab objects and move them around without wanting to slam their head into a wall. That’s when we found gold: Human Fall Flat custom levels.
As Jace's post mentioned, one of our inspirations was the player from Human Fall Flat, mostly due to how flexible and capable their character was. To our surprise, No Brakes Games actually have a version of the game you can play in the editor that lets you look at the general structure of the player character. This became the basis of the game pitch demo, with us using a modified Human Fall Flat player with a custom controller script as our first character. We knew we would move away from this character pretty fast but it served as a good example for us to work off of.
Picture of Human Fall Flat character with its collision visible.
After the Human Fall Flat model, we started work on a new character that was closer to our target player shape and with the ability to grab things. Thus began the life of man_butt, a model I threw together while we waited for a well-made rigged model from the artists. For people who joined our Stout Game Expo demo, this was the character that we were using then. The butt was added to test our ability to add physics to more difficult joints, try not to question it too much.
The new collision for the player in all of its made-in-60-minutes glory.
To begin, we had to figure out the method we wanted to allow for player animation while still being affected by physics. We eventually decided on a system where our actual player tried to rotate their joints towards a target model, which gave us some freedom to set how floppy the limb movements would be.
Example of the player aiming towards target rotations by showing off their sick flexibility.
In the example gif, you can also see a taste of our next goal: arm targeting. One of the things that would give player control over grabbing objects was by moving their arm to a grabbing rotation based on how much you held down the controller trigger. Once all of the rotation targeting worked, we then crossed our fingers and started adding some forces for movement.
Our player's first steps! Well, first glide. So adorable!
The last major step was grabbing objects. Through a lot of trial and error, we figured out that the best way to add this was by creating a joint between the player and the object they wanted to hold. With some added polish such as movement direction based on the camera angle and adding the ability to ragdoll, we had a working character that people seemed to enjoy playing with!
Two player characters in their natural habitat: a work in progress checkout minigame.
That brings us to the current day. The artists gave us a new rigged model with some fantastic animations, which will be the final model we’ll use for the rest of the game. It’s a sad day for the loss of man_butt, but it’s best to look ahead and focus on the bright future. We’re super excited to show off some of our newest additions in the future, and I’ll thank you all for reading by giving you a sneak peek at what our new character is looking like! See you all later!
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