Acrobatic practice?! (Patreon)

I've been working on a polish pass for grapples and scenes so far this week.  I think I have most of the bugs fixed for character placement during both and once I finish up a bunch of animation exports they'll both be using the same system.  I'm hoping this will fix the last bugs of characters not being lined up during their animations.  

I was also going through and looking at a lot of animations from different games and really started to focus in on Dark Souls and how they handle telegraphing the attacks.  There's usually a significant wind up to attacks, then the attack, and then they hold the pose for a second after the attack is finished.  So I'm giving that a try for some of the imps animations to see if they'll work in both the 3rd person view and the 1st person view.  Then I found a couple videos of how they handled their grapples and there was one of those "Ooohhhhhh... I see..."  moments.  

Also looking at the art of screenshakevideo again (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgkIXZ_13Y)  and looking for things I can add to help out the overall feeling of the in game scenes.  So far I've added depth of field, vignette, screen flashing fx, and screenshake.  I'm trying to keep things subtle so that they add to the scene rather than being distracting.  I'll try to get all of the imp scenes hooked up and then see if people have feedback on how things look.

Lastly I added a quality of life feature during animation scenes - the ability to move the characters in the environment.  It isn't anything fancy, only a few UI buttons on the side of the screen, but it will allow the player to move the characters along the XYZ as they want to.  I figured instead of trying to figure out a way of looking at the ground plane then averaging the height and trying to place the characters optimally so they wouldn't clip I would just leave things in the hands of the player.  

I'm hoping these changes will make animations and scenes feel a bit more dynamic and alive.  Once this stuff is done I'm going to start back on the narrative scenes again.  I have the basic framework for them ready to go but now it'll be figuring out how to hook up the extra FX and triggers and then making sure everything flows together well.