Building Character
Entry posted by Josh ·
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My goal with Leadwerks 3 has always been to give the people what they need to make playable games. What they really need. Creative projects are interesting because it's easy to get derailed. You can lose interest in an idea, or you might avoid a critical problem you don't know how to solve, and instead spend time doing fun little things that make you feel like you're making progress when you're not. For example, let's say I am making a dungeon crawler. I have some basic gameplay but I can't figure out how to make my AI do what I want, so I decide I will spend my time painting flags in Photoshop for the 112 factions my game will have. Avoidance kills projects.
It's easy to see this from the outside, but when it's your own work it's much harder to separate and see the progress from an objective perspective. It requires a sense of balance so you can manage the different aspects of a game in tandem and allow them to grow together, never letting one focus become too disproportionately large so that it consumes other critical aspects. Project management.
From my perspective, I try to focus on the most critical problem that holds back games. One huge obstacle we overcame was AI. AI programming used to be an advanced topic only a few people could get to. Now it is easy and everyone can tinker around with it, because we have a standard system it's built on. Same thing goes with level interactions. Implementing simple button-door interactions used to be the stuff only expert programmers could do, but now we have a standard system for it. This opens up the doors for progress and makes my goal of turning players into makers more achievable.
So at the point we're at now, what is needed most? More features (and bug fixes) are very important, but do these things move the ball forward? Do these things improve our ability to get playable games produced? Not really. I will continue to add new stuff, but we should recognize more features aren't really the bottleneck in game production.
If you look through the recent screenshots on Steam, it's pretty obvious what's missing. You have all these cool screenshots of level design, which I love, but the scenes are lifeless and empty. The AI and flowgraph system are innovative system that make gameplay easy to implement. But something is missing, and I think that is animated characters.
Animated characters are very difficult to produce from scratch. There are large collections of these you can buy online, but they still require hotboxes, scripting, sounds, scaling, and various setup procedures. Although Leadwerks makes the import process as easy as possible, there's some stuff you just can't automate.
Another issue is there actually isn't a lot of usable stuff out there, even the paid items. You have problems with consistency from different artists, target polygon counts, animation quality, etc. It's easy to find stuff that looks good at a glance, but then you find out for some reason or another, it just won't work or is incomplete.
So it seems clear that animated characters are a huge unsolved problem: The demands of producing these are far beyond most indies, and there isn't a real usable source of content they can purchase, when you get into the details of it. I even looked at Mixamo Fuse, and although they try to solve the problem, their characters look cartoonish and their animations are ridiculously expensive. I can get custom animations made for much less than they charge just to use an animation on one single model.
I think providing art content is part of what Leadwerks should provide, though I traditionally have not done this in the past. The prospect of creating every kind of character you could need is daunting. Where to even begin? I think The Game Creators have done a decent job of this with their FPSC model packs, but those took years to build up. This needs to be pursued intelligently, with a plan.
Several years ago I wrote a simple program called Character Shop. I had a set of animations produced, and the program allowed the user to weight meshes to a skeleton and export an animated character. I have no plans at this time to bring this back, but the same basic idea is still valid: build your animations once and use them for all characters:
I've commissioned a set of animations to get started with. These will use a standard human skeleton and have animations that can be used and reused. This can be used by both my own artists working on official content and artists in the Leadwerks community who want to just weight their mesh on a standard skeleton and import the animations in the Leadwerks model editor. Once the animations library is built, the cost of creating additional characters is fairly low.
So the first animated character pack is on the way. The other big need are first-person view weapons, and I will see if these can be handled in the same manner. Fortunately, I don't have to do anything to make these happen, so it's back to coding for me!
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