Today it's time for the second monthly devlog, which will mainly focus on the progress towards the physics-based movement for custom dragons, as well as various improvements/ additions to the dragon creator or related assets.Dragon MovementThe main challenge that was tackled this month was making the overall spine movement and flapping of dragons in flight feel more weighty and fluid, especially at higher speeds. This is quite difficult to achieve because game physics tends to look very springy and bouncy, and humans are very good at spotting when something feels off about the scale and motion of things. A particularly time consuming part of the process revolves around finding 'magic numbers' for various physics drivers or animation parameters that result in motion that looks just right.
Here's a version with a shorter golden dragon. At some point the fins and wing membranes will move with the wind.
Another challenge is making everything look good no matter what body the dragon has. Here is a much longer dragon using the same setup.
There has also been work on the rider and saddle. Here the rider is simulated as well and naturally struggles to not fall off the dragon as it moves around. It's also possible to make it so that the rider can be knocked out of the saddle by strong impacts.
Dragon CreatorThe dragon creator underwent a pretty big change this month, but it's not something that can be shown visually because it has to do with how things are handled behind the scenes. Long story short, the previous version had to contain a lot of redundant assets because of a limitation built into an engine algorithm that the creator relied on. I made my own version now that can handle more advanced use cases, which lets us get rid of those redundant assets to save tonnes of space and speed up the creator workflows. It's something that we have wanted to do for a while but didn't want to do in the middle of the dragon creator rollout.Another thing we've spent some time on now after the dragon creator rollout is organizing files and assets, documenting workflows, standardizing things, etc, as it tends to get pretty messy mid development.
Here's an example from a re-texturing effort to bring all assets up to the same standard (before/after):
Here are two examples of new options being worked on: