I finally finished my deep-dive article on DOGWALK, like I promised :D
All about making a playable character in Godot with a choppy animation style! Plenty of visual examples & code snippets! Took quite a while to put together.
studio.blender.org/blog/playabl...

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Yesterday we reached 500 reviews, resulting in getting the "Overwhelmingly Positive" label! 😍
TODAY it's even more!
THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

I put together a little trailer for our Steam store page.
The project is basically done at this point and I'm super stoked to finally release it soon!

store.steampowered.com/app/3775050/...

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Maybe we should've figured out how to organise the AnimationTree better. This is how the final arrangement looks like (Some of these animation nodes go deeper haha)

When it comes to the AnimationTree on DOGWALK, we barely used any blending. It suited the stop-motion style to instantly switch animation states and use one-shot animation nodes.

This is an early version in the video (we had dozens of animations in the end),

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Here's some original tests. I had to do multiple things:
- Limit and step the possible rotations & animation blending factors
- Update only when in sync with the frame-time of the current animation

There's way more going on but I'll save that for a full dev log article.

Implementing stop-motion style animation for DOGWALK was fascinating.
We animated the characters on 2s (meaning 12 fps).
To make the movement sync up I made sure the animation blending & character rotation is matching that, instead of just using linear interpolation!

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Big shout-out to @nozomugames.com for the line collision code sample and @majormcdoom.bsky.social for the 3D Line plugin!
Really helped a lot in getting DOGWALK development started fast. Maybe one day we can make the leash look a bit better :D

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For prototyping it was fun to use 3D Sprites as fast and easy placeholders of characters and their states.
A valid style on its own. Maybe one day :D
But it was better than just colored cubes for communicating ideas.

studio.blender.org/projects/pro...

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Vivien Lulkowski, our art director, put together this keyframe concept to fill in the blanks.

There's a bunch more on our early production logs:
studio.blender.org/projects/pro...

This is the earliest mockup of DOGWALK from November last year! Just my crude animation to pitch the idea to the team.
It's crazy how much imagination and faith is still involved to see the final game in this haha

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While the Steam page is still in progress, download & try the game on our website!
studio.blender.org/blog/dogwalk...

If you want to support our projects, consider signing up.
Us crash-test dummies do our best to stress-test Blender so it is production ready & bug-free.

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Working on a lot of bug fixes for Project DogWalk at this point.
Currently waiting for access to the Steam page :3

Also wondering what I could be posting about. Now there's finally time to do more writing and making-of material!

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I would also like to highlight the Production Logs for the new Blender game project!
Lot's of updates, insight & even playable builds.

studio.blender.org/projects/pro...

It's only for supporters but might be good to know since not everything ends up on the socials here.

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I wanted to try something weird for stepped animations:
Either limit the rotations and blended animations to specific values or update them on 3s.
I think the former is quite promising.

I wanna support that stop-motion style with all the transitions in-engine too.

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