Week 4 - Owen

Hello! I'm Owen, one of the 3D artists on the project. I'm primarily work on our animations but you'll see this week I mostly worked on rigging our player character. 

Change in Direction

Before I get into what I did this week specifically, I want to share the team's new direction for One More Game. Originally, we planned to develop a collection of games inspired by niche titles from the 90s. We had Rex Hunt, a first person dinosaur hunting game, and Rogue Asphalt, an arcade style racing game. Initially, we figured it made the most sense to focus on one game at a time to ensure high quality for both. But after carefully considering feedback from our play testers, we’ve decided to drop Rogue Asphalt and go all in on making Rex Hunt the best it can be.

The whole team has a ton of passion for Rex Hunt, and during our Monday discussions, we came up with a bunch of exciting ideas to flesh out the dino-hunting experience. One huge benefit of focusing solely on Rex Hunt is that it gives us more room to weave our narrative throughout the game. We're especially excited about exploring the idea that the Rex Hunt save file belongs to the player's late father, who left behind little details and secrets for his child (our player) to discover.

Rigging the Player Character

Now onto my tasks for the week. Since our change in direction for the game, we decided to revise the rig of our player character. The last few weeks of the project we've been animating our character with an un-tuned Maya quick rig, and this worked for the most part but the rig didn't allow for certain techniques that could really benefit our animation process such as parenting objects to the hands. So this week I took on the task of rigging our character from scratch! Since our game is first person, my main area of focus were the hands and arms. 

Hand Rig

I’m using FK for the fingers, with controllers in place in case we decide to implement IK later. I also set up a hand controller that uses driven keys for various hand poses. That system isn’t fully finished yet, as it wasn’t strictly necessary for the simpler animations we currently need.

Arm Rig

I went with a hybrid setup, FK for the shoulder and IK for the arm and wrist. I chose this approach because it makes it easier to animate the arms around the weapons. Our guns need to stay in a very specific position centered near the bottom of the screen so the player can aim using the sights at all times

Bolt Action Animations

This is my first time animating for an FPS, and it’s been a lot of fun to experiment with! My main focus was keeping the gun centered on-screen to maintain that retro video game feel. I also had to make sure the animations were quick and readable without blocking the player's view. While doing research, I came across a great tip from a Bungie developer: FPS animations should never obstruct the player's “area of action”—the central part of the screen where the player is looking 90% of the time. That insight really shaped how I approached everything.

Animations in Order:

• Shoot
• Chamber
• Idle
• Going into sprint
• Coming out of sprint
• Reload

I hope you enjoyed this little slice of development! We're all very passionate about our game and we can't wait to share more next week.