On what I've been doing recently... (GIF heavy)

So here's the fun Catch-22 of profile websites and game development logs: you want to show off your best, but a game in prototype is by definition an unfinished mess. But unless you talk about it, the tumbleweeds in your blog roll, and then you have a completely different problem...

Anyway, here's what I've been doing recently: How many of you would be interested to hear about a 3D procedural boss fighting game?

Hopefully, enough of you to read this text... Anyway, this has been in development both from ~late November 2016 and way earlier back in 2014-15 (those old character controller posts? That was being written for older prototypes of this); I've been gnawing at the technical challenges of this for a while. The gist of it is that a 3D boss can be assembled from a set of parts; limbs, torsos, angry eye lasers and so on and then be set upon by the player in a I-will-figure-out-the-context-later deathmatch.

Parts would be sourced from sets of Themes (also containing textures and models and other such things), and Bosses would be generated by taking two Themes and bashing them together, such that 'Knight + Tree' would give you an armoured vine/flower knight and 'Tree + Fire' would give you a burning tree thing and so on.

The generation side of things I'd actually had working for a while, but it's only now I've gotten the animation side of things in an actually viable, workable state.

These gifs are circa ~December 2016; they're the first-pass prototypes of boss generation and animation, blending walkcycles with attack animations along with using position/rotation springs and various other methods of interpolation to keep things looking smooth. Things have progressed since then to include an actual character you can run around and swing your sword with, jump around and get punted across the level as:

It's come along pretty quick and fast for all its complexity; I'm currently approaching the point of a viable tech demo; boss generation, AI and animation is in, the player and the boss can get into fights and so on. Only a few standing tasks remain, such as UI and having more than one Theme for the generator to actually work with (I only used the one Theme whilst all the systems were being built, so there's really only the one boss as above due to lack of content). Developing ways for Themes to blend themselves together has been an interesting exercise, culminating in, amongst other things, a series of mesh modifiers I can use to, for instance, fit arbitrary armour pieces to the Knight limbs:

I've been meaning to blog about this project's development, here and on TigSource, but it's always been the running question of 'when is there enough to show?'. With the tech demo upcoming, this should hopefully be enough to pique some interest.