Thread by @izzyLizard

WARNING: This thread will contain MAJOR SPOILERS for the end parts of the The Pathless. This is the only video that will contain the courtesy warning at the start.

Let's talk about the animation of the things in this video and more! #ThePathless #Spoilers

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Oh no, our Eagle friend has been cursed by the Godslayer and is now a gigantic two headed beast! This is her combined flight cycles in game. She has similar behavior both before and during the final battle: circle the tower menacingly.

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Compared to her normal form, she doesn't really have that many animations overall! We have a straight ahead flap cycle, and then leans. I used the small eagle as a base, making adjustments for the size and the newly added long tail. Almost a dragon?

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Your friend that's been with you since the start is now attacking you, and your only shelter is these spread out rocks. The swoop attack combined with the low camera angle really makes this such a tense moment. @89ravenclaw helped me clean this one up!

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This whole section took a lot of iteration to make it feel right. We wanted it to be stressful, but not so much that it was punishingly hard and not fun. Having the Hunter stumble and be out of breath only when reaching shelter only added to the tension.

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She has a similar swoop attack during the boss fight, only much closer up and scary. In order to animate this, I pulled in the mesh from the top of the tower into Maya to make sure everything was to scale and the correct distances traveled.

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There's a few tricks we do here to keep everything smooth and fluid! A little bit before doing the attack, we make sure she dips down below the horizon line so we can teleport her without there being a visible pop if she happened to be on screen.

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She always flies up a fixed distance straight out from the center of the tower. During a window at the start of the animation, her root is allowed to rotate to track the player, and when that window ends, she flies straight at that angle, raking across.

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Since the camera stops following her once the Godslayer teleports back in, I didn't have to worry about syncing up to her flap cycle cleanly, because she'd always be off screen! Save that time where you can!

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Her other attack is a knockback and mortar barrage. She does this when the Hunter interrupts the Godslayer in front of an obelisk. Besides looking and feeling punchy, the wind knockback also made sure the player was in a good position to dodge the rest.

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I decided to do this whole attack as one long animation instead, which allowed it to be really fluid. By the time I animated it for real, we had a good sense of what felt good timing wise on the projectiles, so I just made sure to line it up with that!

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One of my favorite little touches I added to this animation is that one head screeches at you during while she's flying off to the side at the end of the attack. We knew she's always be coming towards the camera, so I thought it made for a cool moment.

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I also want to mention that except for a few things, @GregoryMarlow was responsible for most of the excellent animations on the Godslayer's normal form here, while I worked on the Cursed Eagle. I ended up doing all the anims for the GS's Tall One form.

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Going to pause and take a small break. We'll continue on with Godslayer's Tall One form here in a little bit!

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The first thing I experimented with was the general pose and stance the Tall One Godslayer would be in for the different phases of the encounter. I originally made this as a looping idle, but we used it as a one off instead to speak to the player.

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Did I mention this dude is absolutely MASSIVE? That tiny little dot is the Hunter to scale. Like the Eagle before, I brought the top of the tower into Maya to make sure everything lined up. Animating something this huge having weight was a real challenge!

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Here's the hand slam attack from Phase 1. As a ledge boss, we were afforded knowing where the camera was generally going to be, so I made sure the animations looked great from that angle. I had to cheat some arcs in world space to keep the hand in frame.

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If you noticed he keeps his hand still for awhile after the slam that was deliberate. I wanted to make sure that any hit reactions felt impactful, but his sheer size made it so that we had to be conscious of the pose he would be in as he flinched.

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After the second hit, he does a much bigger hit reaction, and afterwards holds that hand to his chest in pain. As we had no way of knowing which hand the player would "defeat" first, this meant I needed to create two versions of everything here on out.

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Defeat the remaining hand and he collapses down into a more exhausted pose. Getting the Godslayer to this "weaker" looking pose early was on purpose. We wanted the Hunter to feel extremely empowered by her reunion with the Eagle, not struggling to survive

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I made it a goal to make the him very reactive to which hand was injured, so that it felt like the player's actions were actually impactful. I had to make extra animations, but I felt like it was worth the time. Here's an anim flowchart from my notebook.

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Now that he's down and hurt, things are starting to heat up! He still retains his hand slam attacks from the first phase, but now they come quicker and we don't need to allow the player time to shoot them. Functionally it's the same, but the anim is new.

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This attack we called Mortar Vomit. One thing I tried to do throughout all of his animations was make him shaking and and jittering like he's starting to struggle. It was a fine balance to find the right amount, but it makes it even more creepy.

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This one was my favorite for how awesome it ended up feeling with all the fx added in! When I was working in Maya, I added a cylinder to make sure I had a good arc and spacing, and that it was in the center so that tracking adjustments could be made.

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Btw, all the amazing FX were done by James Chao! Dude's a total wizard. He doesn't have Twitter that I know of, or I'd definitely tag him!

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Big hit reaction on the eye shield break! I was really proud of this one. I really amped up the shakes and jaw quivering to really sell that this actually hurt him. With his nonstop onslaught of attacks, this also gives the player a brief respite.

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Something I probably spent too much time on since you can't see it well from the gameplay camera: the bony fingers sliding along and reacting to the contours of his face. It's one of those things that you don't see it, but you really feel it.

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Additives were the best solution for the small hit reactions in this phase. Looks like a bobble head in isolation, but works great in context. Even though we didn't end up using it, for maximum flexibility, I made additives for each individual eye.

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This is the Godslayer's ultimate last stand attack, and the final moment of the gameplay. The goal was to feel really powerful with the quick firing of arrows, but also to build a sense of urgency. We intended most players to never see this attack fire.

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That's about it for showing off all the animation work put into bringing this final encounter to life! It was a monumental effort from everyone on the Giant Squid team and I'm so proud of what we were able to pull off in such a short time! Real superstars

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But wait, there's more! Ever wonder what animators really do all day? I guarantee you it's about 90% this.

Another fun fact: I was in a real retro mood while I was working on this guy, so most of it was done while listening exclusively to 80s pop music.

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And if you made it alllll the way down here, you deserve another treat. Have some reference footage I shot of myself trying to find the right staging and acting for all this. I'm sorry I had to flatten you, lil squishy dragon.

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As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read through, and supporting The Pathless! It really means the world to me to hear such kind words from everyone that enjoyed the game. You're all the best 💖

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Oh yeah, and if you're interested in similar threads on the other bosses in the game, you can start with Cernos here! All the other ones are linked at the end of that thread as well so they're easy to find!