Our first goal when beginning the animation for ‘83 was to get the basics feeling really smooth. This gives us a baseline for playtesting; a bare minimum that we can expand upon and eventually apply more advanced systems to as we progress. These animations include, but are not limited to walking, crouching and proning. Each of these animations have subsections, for instance, under crouching we have a walking and crouching. These animations also require transitions; from walking to jogging, from jogging to proning. Getting these transitions to feel realistic and smooth can be a real challenge, but one that our experienced animation department are used to!
Weapon Animations
Our animators start work with a very basic block out of each weapon type. This allows them to create basic animations with a variety of weapons. A player weilding a rifle, for instance, walks very differently to a player weilding a pistol. Each of these animations have to be created in first person and third person.
A new system currently being introduced is a Freelook mode for first person, giving the player the opportunity to survey the area without full body movement while in cover, or spot enemies while sprinting through a battlefield, making movement more tactical and give control to the player. With this comes a new way of animating first person, no longer is there only the arms and weapon on a locked camera to consider, but now we have full upper body animations, giving a sense of realism to the player as they see animations in more detail.
Advanced Systems
Our animation department have pitched a ton of cool and unique systems for ‘83, most of which we want to keep under wraps at the moment! We can, however, confirm that movement such as ladder climbing and physics based death animations are currently being prototyped. Our coders and animators are also currently working on dynamic mantaling, leaning and limping.
The priority for animation at this early stage is to push the range of the movement for the player, working with designers to get a sense of where the limits should be, how high can climb? How far can you jump? We do not want the player to feel restricted in how they navigate the maps.
