Welcome to our 47th Newsletter! This week we’re going to be taking a look at some of the work that makes the suspects, civilians, and your fellow officers feel more alive. It’s a subject that is unfortunately not talked about very often in comparison to its cousins AI, effects, and textures despite being just as important or more depending on who you talk to.

The animations of both the player character and the AI in Ready or Not help contribute to the feeling of unease as you approach a suspect that hasn’t either surrendered or revealed their intentions. The shifting of their feet, the way they look around the room, even how they reach into their jacket or pants to retrieve something all contribute to these feelings.

For today's newsletter we consulted with Raihaku, one of VOID Interactive's animators, whose background and skill lend very well to the atmosphere of Ready or Not being one of the architects around many of the recent and incredibly well made trailers.

Animations by Raihaku

Part of the reason why animation doesn’t get much discussion is because there is nothing really mind-blowing to discuss, it’s unique in a sense because gameplay animation can get weirdly specific and a lot of stuff feels invisible to the player until it’s not there, and it’s really obvious that it isn’t there. It isn’t like AI or Levels where there’s amazing videos of their navigation and behaviors or pretty screenshots and images to show off.

Animating is, mostly, “We’re figuring out the time we spent blending the character between two poses and how they turn in place if they’re looking around or while they’re standing still and doing a neat shuffling animation.”

Demonstration of various NPC states, instead of walking everywhere with their weapons up, they can take it slow with their weapons down as they investigate.

This is a preview of the movement system that we currently have in-game, this was a solution to the lack of momentum the NPCs have when they move around as they used to not build up any acceleration an actual person would need to start moving quickly, making them frustrating to fight against and hard to read. This is our method to interpret that into the game by blending between multiple types of animations, which is a walk, run, and sprint as demonstrated in the first section of the video followed by a walk and a jog in the second section of the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWPONOc1zaM&ab_channel=VOIDInteractive

The way the speeds are interpreted in the actual game is simple: We increment from a 0 to 1 value, 0 being a full-stop and 1 being at full-speed, and the numbers in between 0 and 1 serve as the acceleration. This also gives us a wider range of motion as the strafes were initially only 8-directional, being able to blend between these directions means that they look more precise during navigation.

It's not a very technologically groundbreaking method and it has been around since the early 2000s. Valve uses this for all their game animations in the Source engine since Half-Life 2 and it helps their game animations achieve a very natural look with such a simple system.

Under the hood, there are many aspects of game design and development that the general public doesn’t see, along with our newsletters that show off the inspiration behind our levels, we will also be producing more newsletters that go more into detail about all of the things that make Ready or Not tick!

Conclusion

This concludes our 47th briefing. Be sure to tune in next time for more development news!

Keep your feet on the ground. VOID Interactive

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