Weapon Effects and Animations

Now that the basic functionality has been  made for all the weapons, now we need animations and effects that go with the weapons. I wanted to begin making changes to the effects that were being used for attacking, as all melee weapons  used the same punching effect no matter the weapon type . So I began with making a slash effect at the very least to start differentiating between all of the different weapons. To do this I used  a Visual Effects Graph as well as a basic model made in blender. By using the model of a squished cylinder  and using that as the basis for the effect I made a slash effect that would travel along the face of the cylinder. This made the effect look like that of a swinging weapon that had a trail behind it. Best of all it can be reused for multiple different weapon types as the effect can be changed to suit all of the different weapons. For example the color of the effect can be changed as well as the size. This will prove useful when making the effects of all the other weapons as we can reuse this effect and change it to fit our needs for the rest.

I wanted to start giving all of the weapons their animation for their basic attack at the very least so I chose to start off with the Hearts weapon, the sword and shield. This proved to be a bit trickier than what I thought it would be, mainly due to finding suitable animations for the weapon that didn't cost money to use. But after finding a suitable one I started setting up the transitions. At any time the player is in an animation state, most likely the idle or walking state. And it's smoothly being able to transition between these states that allows for the character to feel smooth in their gameplay. Because of this it was my main goal to make the player's attack animation not feel clunky. With that being said it wasn't such an easy task as their were times that animations got stuck between transitions. But with some tweaks that checked if the player was in a  state that allowed for attacks, such as not being in the air or not being in the middle of another animation, the player now attacks with an animation. Lastly was adding the effect to the animation and that was accomplished using an animation event that ran a function once it hit a certain frame. That function simply turned on the game object that has the animation, which in turn made the slash effect play.

Now I'm continuing in doing the attacks for the rest of the weapons and in honest, the hardest part has been finding animations that work for what we need without having to spend money for them.

Author: Gustavo Camacho

Published: 04/26/2024