My own take on classic beat ‘em up games.

This is an advanced prototype, showing core combat.

FPP Melee Animset – more powerful attacks!

Attack animations in FPP Melee Animset are played with moderate speed by deafult. This is because, if you want to speed up the animation, you will loose nothing from it’s original keying.

If you want to achieve much powerful looking attacks, you can do couple of things in your game engine:

– speed up the attack animations (x 1.5 for example)
– add procedural camera shake while swinging the weapon, and especially while hitting targets
– add powerful sound effects
– add particles in the moment of hitting the target – blood, sparks, dust, pieces of armour flying…
– use powerful hit reactions on the enemies and other targets – ragdolls for example

Example gameplay with those tweaks:

FPP Melee Animset for UE4

The set of over 360 animations for 5 medieval weapon types has been released at Unreal Marketplace.

FPPFeatured.jpg

Tips for usage (you may use them, but you don’t have to):

  • If the camera parented to the head feels to shaky and you would like it to be more static, you can constrain its rotation by code, for example with look at constraint. You could also unparent the camera from the head bone and make it follow the head bone by code, which will give you more control – you could dampen the rotations and translations, add procedural camera shake etc.

  • For retargeting purposes, there are no weapon bones or camera bones. You parent the weapon models directly to hands and the camera directly to the head.

  • To achieve “full body awareness”, you may use leg walking animations from Sword & Shield Animset Pro (see other Kubold’s animation packs on the store). This way, when the player looks down, he can see the legs.

  • You can use this set for single handed weapons without the shield too (just hide the shield in Unity)

  • If you want to hide all weapons and just have an animated camera head bobbing for unarmed mode, you can use any animation from this set – just disable the renderer on the weapons and hands, after “unequip weapon” animation.

  • All animations are “in-place” (there is no root motion, since FPP characters feel best when moving from code). This means, that some animations, like Dodge back, Knockdown, Stun, Crouch, Walk, Run etc., will make visual sense only in combination with character capsule movement. So for example, a “Dodge back” animation should include an actual moving the character capsule back by 3-4 meters from code. A second example: you should lower the character by code, when playing “Crouch Start” animation, so the character really crouches.

  • You can slightly adjust your camera to modify how all animations look in the viewport – change FOV, height and up/down rotation as you prefer