Log 20: Making a Group Animation

Before starting on Link Attacks, or Group Attacks, or whatever I settle on calling the mechanic, I decided to work on the bugs that I discovered during my last round of developing. Namely the bugs with the weapon trails and the bug with summoning the rideable mount.

The weapon trail was easy enough, in the function to unsummon it on the weapon itself, I included a bit to force disable the trail. This was because sometimes the deactivate function call would come after the "Active Weapon Trails" map was reset.

The rideable mount was also much easier than I had originally thought. In a stroke of insight I realized that the reason the character was getting launched into space was because one of its collision volumes wasn't being disabled and the physics engine was trying to push it outside of the mount's collision volume while also having the mount be attached to it. All it took was finding whatever new volume I hadn't already turned the collision off on (it was one of the volumes/meshes used in the morphing somehow).

Finally I could work on the Linked Attacks and the Group Attack. I explained what the Linked Attacks would be in the last post, but the Group Attack is for when all the Rangers are linked into the player using their Ultimate technique. The reasons for these mechanics is two-fold. The Linked Ultimate Attacks, or similar systems, exist in multiple Warriors games (described below), and Power Rangers / Sentai teams almost always have both big flashy Ultimates individually and bigger combination attacks as a team.

Power Rangers: Wild Force Group Attack. From the Power Rangers Wiki.

So, now that I have laid out precedence from both of my game's inspirations, I next need to figure out how Linked and Group Attacks are going to work.

In Warriors Orochi 3, if two or more characters are standing near each other and have full Musou bars (and one of them is the player), when one activates their Musou (the Warriors version of an Ultimate attack), the others automatically switch in when the first is done to do their own Musou.

In Warriors Orochi 4, there is much the same system, except you don't need to be near each other (as far as I can remember) and you have to do a button input to combo into the next character's Musou attack.

In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, if you have an adjutant assigned to the character you are controlling and then do your Ultimate your Adjutant does their Ultimate first and then the controlled character switches in to do their own.

Other games may have a similar mechanic, but it has been a while since I played them (and I admittedly haven't played them all), but you get the idea. There are several different ways I could go about this, or even a new way for a new theme.

What I would want to do is have a unique animation/attack for every possible combination of Rangers. Something similar to the Showtime mechanic from Persona 5: Royal, that shows not only the character's personalities but how they can bounce off each other. Obviously I can't do this because of how insanely expensive this would be to do production-wise.

So, I had to cut down the goal to something realistically obtainable.

Instead I animated a group of control rigs in a level sequence, and then created animations out of those rigs:

The group attack animations I made. They aren't great but animation, while fun, isn't my focus.

The first thing I did was come up with their group pose at the beginning, because ridiculous poses are a part of the fun and if you can't have fun with your passion, why do it? The next thing I had to consider was their weapons. Specifically what weapons did I want them all to use? What COULD I have them use through store bought animations? Eventually I found some animation packs from two uploaders on the Unreal Marketplace that provided a quality and diversification that I liked. I'll go into them more when it comes time to finally create the characters. So, I found weapons in the Synty asset packs that could work and used them to create the animations I would need. (Yes, all of them are wielding melee weapons except for one with a gun. That's for future story reasons that I'm already planning and will go into in the future). I know it doesn't look like much now, especially compared to the example I provided at the beginning, but that's because I haven't created any of the effects yet. The main one planned is that they are all charging a big ball of energy between them that they then shoot forward to devastating effect.

My intent is to set it up so that you get this group attack if you have between a minimum of two to the maximum of six Rangers linked / in close proximity (and they all meet the minimum Power requirement). So if you only have two, say the spear & shield Ranger and the staff Ranger, they would always show up in the same relative positions to where the attack charges (about where the player was standing and facing when they activated the Group Ultimate). This way I only need to create one set of animations and not a bunch of custom ones for different combinations. Which is good because I need to draw the line somewhere and get back to my programming work.