GameDev Diary v.0.0.1: Lolly and (her) robots feature

At the beginning, I have to say what, or rather who, is Lolly. She is the main character from a game, being created by me and Gregory, called “Lolly: Surrounded by Men”. The point of story is that Lolly is the last woman on earth and she has to survive in this cruel world. Surrounded by men, of course. But she won’t be alone! With a little help come pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers and immortal minigun.

Generally, this game has been in production for a week for the “Women are too hard to animate” jam. Interesting fact – this jam was launched when someone from Ubisoft said a funny thing: “We don’t have much women in our game because they are too hard to animate”. And, ironically, the only rule on this jam is that the main character must be a woman.

We had decided to make a really fast-paced shooter game. And it happened to be Lolly. At the moment, we are making only “Survival” mode (for Jam, as I said before) but we have some ideas for story mode, too.

However, maybe we should talk about something more interesting than Ubisoft tittle-tattle. Today I want to write about our incredibly simple animation system for enemies and main character. The whole mechanics is working on just three key-frames for movement and some additional frames for things like crouching or shooting. For example I put below a “Soldier” frames.

The next step is to switch quickly between them (in exactly 0,1s) what gives us a nice effect:

As a bonus, I’ll say that we are going to add a new enemy to the game. At this point we call him “Heavy”, but maybe someone has a better name for him? Moreover, he wields a rocket launcher and the only one way to destroy him safely is from a distance before he puts his weapon up.

(Click to launch gif)

And that is all. In the future and in the next of “GameDev Diary” series I will regularly talk about this project.

Cheers,
Patrick.

Ps: Check Lolly facebook fanpage here: Facebook.com and blog: Devclaw.com