Thread by @glassbottommeg

We're getting to where stuff is starting to feel Good with the basic character rig in next game, and I'm realizing it's because

somehow

this is the first game we've ever done where we just have a simple, reliable character rig, and a pro animator has control over look and feel.

Jones On Fire? I did it all.

Hot Tin Roof? Animator, BUT, hamstrung by weird boxy people and side-scrolling tech.

Spartan Fist? Animator, BUT, hamstrung by floating fists/hands AND we did our own first-person hand anims (sigh)

SkateBIRD? Animator, BUT, physics-driven character

It's almost like just having a normal person with a limited set of normal-person video game verbs, moving across a normal-person video game open world'y kind of space, is easier, especially if you have a standard pre-existing character rig w/ placeholder anims to use as reference

"Normal person", I mean they're still an extremely Birdy bird, but you know just "bird that moves like normal"

Even normal UE4 IK just works. The UE5 full-body IK even properly handles the triple jointed legs! If you look under the fluff, the true knee is ACTUALLY BENDING RIGHT.

Granted, we're in this position because, for ONCE, we can just go:

"I shall hire an animator to do this full animation set that we know we need."

Part of it's UE5/starting w a real character base, but the rest is not having to cleverly design around "no money to do this right."

SkateBIRD's character rig works like they do because we had to weld a character, somehow, to a fully physical board, and just make it, keep up. Couldn't afford to fully animate all the states it would take for that.

Why weirdo board? Couldn't afford THPS-style animation density.

And that all looked great, and produced something really cool, but when you start with these weird barely-holding-together solutions, you're anchoring yourself in barely-holding-together land. It's hard to tack from there back to "highly polished and easy to explain to users."

Meanwhile, if you START with something immediately legible and simple to communicate, it's comparatively easy to just, kick it down the Weird Well and see how far down things go before it gets Too Weird. You start from a known safe zone, you always know how to dial things back.

(if you want an explanation of "wait how weird ARE SkateBIRD physics/animation", the leaping off point is this reply header)

https://twitter.com/gameism/status/1487199235506331650