First week; Main Character Creation

During this first week, I began by dabbling into using the Accurig program to take non-rigged models from SketchFab and give them skeletons that could be used for animations taken from Mixamo. It's a lovely system that's incredibly easy to use, though as of the writing of this devlog it can only create humanoid skeletons with two arms and two legs and relatively human proportions. This wasn't too big of an issue for the main character as she is a human model, but it proved slightly trying for the enemy; more on that during the second week reflection.

Using a cylinder with a square attached to it's top and offset to showcase the direction it was facing, I got started on creating a system that would turn the character to match the camera's direction (keeping their back to it when moving "forward").  This was done using quaternions and euler angles, which were calculated with the MathF functions. Then, if either the horizontal or vertical axis returned anything other than a plain 0, the game object found the difference between its own angle and the cameras, and then smoothly adjusted to match the same heading.

Following that; I swapped the cylinder for the main characters model found on SketchFab and ensured that she turned in the same way as she slid around the testing scene. Next was adding her walking and running animations. This was done by doing a similar check to triggering the angle matching... If horizontal or vertical was anything but a plain 0 the walking animation would be triggered. If the sprint key was being held down, which doubled the movement speed, the run animation would be triggered. After, I implemented animation checks and animations from Mixamo for jumping which included two separate landings based on speed, dodge diving, and both heavy and light attacks.

With the animations in place, next was hitboxes and sound effects. The hitboxes were simple and almost relaxing, she's represented by a set of box colliders over her fists and feet, arms and legs, chest, and head. It was the sound effects that proved to be one of the most frustrating pieces of building this character. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of female grunts and effort sounds for the type of game we're trying to make; there were however plenty of a far too happy sounding character...

Next was a script to select the sound effects we needed for each movement which I was determined to make scalable so that it could be attached to any entity that needed to make sound. This was done by attaching the sounds to an animator controller and calling them based on serialized strings that could be adjusted for each game objects animation controllers bools and triggers. For sounds that were a bit more specialized, they were done by calling a method in an animation event that took in an integer and played the sound from an array at the given integers position. 

Finally, she was done... I thought. More on that during the week two reflection.