Last week, I polled the Discord server to get an idea of what camera most people play with. The overwhelming response was First Person. I also prefer first person cameras in shooter games but it was still a surprise since Grimoire offered the option to use either First or Third. Since this was such a popular request I decided to push forward with adding first person camera and animations sooner than originally planned.
There are a lot of different areas that this touches in the project so it turned into a full weekend task but I was able to complete it plus get all of the base Fire spells in place using the new camera and animations. Using a placeholder animation asset pack from the Unreal Engine marketplace I was able to get this all up and running fairly quickly.
One thing that players will notice is that the first person animations you see as a player won’t exactly match the third person ones you see on other player’s characters. This is a temporary thing until I have the resources to get final animations made but for now they should at least match the same mechanics of each spell. For example, a charged Fire Secondary spell will still show the player charging it but the animation itself will look a little different.
As I mentioned above the first class I’ve been focusing on is Fire. Fire is a damage dealing class with a focus on area of effect damage and area denial. This weekend I made great progress getting all of it’s base spells up and running using the new ability system. There is still balancing, tweaking, and a few more minor things to add but in general they are working great and at least for now appear to be bug free.
In a later update I’ll get more in depth on Fire and also introduce the second class but for now please enjoy the GIFs of the spells in action and the first peek into the project! Please keep in mind this is very early stages and things like mana cost, cooldowns, and damage are all subject to change.
-Brent
May 18, 2020
