Violent Sirens Progress Report - August 2021 (Patron Only Version) (Patreon)

On the last week of July, I had finished up finally re-writing the entire striking system for my game. This was due to the fact that I was unable to use Root Motion with a couple plugins I had caked on top of each other, and decided to wipe the entire combat system as well as the plugins in mid-June and start combat over from scratch.

After a month in July, I finally got striking working again, but this report is about August so we'll talk about the last month of work since I was gone from Twitter.

Note: All animations seen in this report are simply practice/placeholder, and not representative of the final game's quality. I'm still learning. 

Laia Luna Meets A New Art Style

So lets start with the beginning of August. For the first two weeks, I had taken a break from code after writing that entire strike system to develop a second character. The model is not completely finished, and won't be for some time, I just wanted to get her model down for now and try out some more techniques in creating hair.

Here is the original Laia Luna concept art, created by my good friend Jared Calder. 

After trying multiple hair techniques, and thinking real long and hard, I decided to completely revamp the art style of Violent Sirens. This isn't going to appeal for everyone, and I apologize if you were looking forward to a photo-realism game. But the fact of the matter is, dev is just way faster and easier if you go stylized.

What does Stylized mean in this context? 

First off, the proportions of my models aren't changing. They're going to stay mostly realistic. You aren't going to see WWE Battlegrounds sized characters in Violent Sirens. It simply means I'm not using hair cards, but rather 3D "blob" hair, as well as flat-color texturing in the style of Fortnite. Below, you can see screenshots from Substance Painter of Laia Luna's skin textures with and without shading.

Her gear, modelled in Blender, acts the same way. A simple flat color (pink), with shadow shading of similar color to add depth. There's no "detail" textures -- like fabric, skin pores etc. I think the game lasts much longer, visually, this way than going for realism that could be dated in a few years very quickly. 

With this method, I try to avoid Roughness as a crutch for shine but I also over-use Metallic a little bit, to give it a nice shine in-engine when studio lights and such will be reflected off the models.

The inspiration for this style is sort of Valorant and Fortnite, as I feel like their recent female models like Ariana Grande are killer inspiration. 

A New Ring Model

Upon realizing that Apron moves would be a cool idea to have and I could recycle animations, I decided to completely re-do my ring. This was my first foray into modelling in Blender and it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be. The ring is nearly 1:1 accurate to NJPW dimensions (according to internet measurements, that is). This allows a big apron width for the character to stand on sideways, and would allow for me to easily recycle and slightly edit animations like Suplexes, DDTs and more for Apron moves.

The ring only clocks in at 7,000 vertices which I think is half decent. It can be decimated more if necessary. Here is the geometry in Blender.

The new ring still allows for a reasonable four person match-up, I've yet to test six-person but I don't think there is too much of a spacing issue within gameplay. A simple two character match as well has a huge amount of room for gameplay still. I left the outside of the ring still a big playground for now. I'm undecided on it's final layout in terms of announce tables and such, so for now it's going to remain untouched. 

Below is an in-engine shot of the ring and outside space.

Running is a Nightmare.

The next bit of code I decided to work on after the art-break was getting running strikes back up and running as I forgot. The actual toggle running part, was easy. The blending into the strike part was easy. What was *not* easy was getting the character to bounce on the ropes, as well as directional running. 

I have an incredibly terrible hacked up system at the moment as a "band-aid" to directional running. 

First off, credit to Gackdaw for helping me with this a few weeks back, I set up an enumerator for getting my stick/walk input direction. 

Unfortunately, even after days of searching StackOverflow and Google and UE4 forums, I couldn't really understand many solutions for hard-directional running. So in a last ditch effort, I decided to sort of make it map-based. The balls in the ring photo above are "locators", and when the run is toggled, it checks our Stick Direction enumerator and, depending on the direction, targets one of the ball-actors as the run direction. You have the middle of each ropes, and the 4 corners to run towards. I don't think this system is going to remain final, I'm probably going to completely re-write it in the future as I learn more blueprint techniques.

If anyone reading this wants to help with out, please do! Nevertheless, no matter how messy the code is... It works. You can run towards all directions, and bounce off the ropes. (The ropes currently have no animation). 

The next goal I wanted to finish up was running ground strikes, as well as a recovery for the move if the strike ends up with the attacker "downed". I animated a shitty quick kip-up to test the system, and it seems to work. The root motion in the kip-up is screwed up, so it doesn't blend together right. But it works.

https://streamable.com/59sy5g 

Grapples Are Back, Bay Bay!

By the 25th of August, I had finally been able to reincorporate grapples into my game as I had the base code for strikes down now. Over the last two weeks I've started animating one grapple in Blender per day and I'm getting better everyday. Here's the newest, crappiest example but as you can see it looks a bit smoother/better than the strikes and the kip-ups already. I've also moved to animating in 60fps, as opposed to 30. 

The catalyst for Grappling in Violent Sirens is courtesy of Jon Van Dam's GrappleComponent plugin, which you may see being used in other upcoming wrestling games as well (including the UE4 Luchador game). 

GrappleComponent is easy to set up, you essentially just make the two animations and create a "Grapple Object" blueprint. 

Inside these blueprints, you simply just break the GrappleData structures and tweak the settings and then plug in the two animations you need. Once you get the hang of it, you can simply copy and paste a grapple object and tweak a few values and you got a new grapple in your game in seconds. 

https://streamable.com/g4wbj9 

You can also add Queued Events to your grapples, such as casting to your character and making them go into downed state, creating major reversals, or even mid-grapple grapples! It also has a built in camera sequencer, which I've yet to mess around with, for creating unique angles for each grapple. 

Another unique feature is "animation matching", where you can set up certain bones in your skeleton to always target a certain bone on the opponent. For example, if a skinny character grapples a plus-sized character without animation matching, her hand or other limbs could clip through. However, with animation matching, the animation will automatically adjust itself so the attacker's hand is always on the opponents thigh in a suplex, for example. 

This is an incredibly powerful system that YOU bought me. Thank you to every Patron around. Here is a short clip of that shitty animation being used in-engine as a grapple. 

I still have to tweak some code for it to blend better, but as you can see it "just works". 

https://streamable.com/kwgnkz 

WHATS NEXT FOR SEPTEMBER?

Honestly, I sort of just "go with the flow", but here's my basic goals. 

I'm going to watch more animation theory videos. Milos Cerny on YouTube is incredible, and I've found a lot of good Blender speed animating tutorials that bolstered my progress.

Code wise, I want to finish up tweaking my grapple objects so I sort of have a "Master Template" that works no matter what, and I can simply copy and paste it for each animation I create and speed-create Grapples.

I also need to fix when and how the targeting system is activated, as it's starting to piss me off a bit with not wanting to de-activate itself among other things. 

Once that's complete, I'm going to use the Stick Direction enumerator to create multiple grapples off the single grapple button (B). Up+B = Suplex, Down+B = DDT, etc. Once I break the moveset a little more, it'll be easier to understand which ones I need to animate.

After that, we'll move on to Back Grapples. 

If I can get all that done in September, I'm going to completely clean-up/refine my combat code as it stands right now before moving on, so I don't encounter any major glitches in the future when adding things like jumping off the top rope or apron grapples and such.

Please continue supporting if you enjoy these progress reports. Some people unsubscribed because they said I didn't update you enough -- that's true and I'm sorry. I get too focused on the game development I forget to tell you guys about it! hah.