Its good to be an indie.

You know, sometimes it hits home just how cool it is to be part of the indie community.

Yesterday, I was discussing my RPG design with some of my friends, in particular I was talking about combat. In most RPGs, its a case of swinging at your opponent until they lose all their hitpoints and fall over. I would like to implement something a bit more interesting than that, something like what you see in books/movies. In those, you don't have people whacking chunks out of each other for 5 minutes. Instead, most of the combat revolves around feints and parries, trying to get your opponent off balance/off guard so you can then deliver a fatal strike while they are weakened.

Anyway, it was fun to think about a potential system along those lines, but I came back down to earth and told the guys "yeah, that could be pretty fun, but it would require a lot of extra animation work, and I have so many other things to do, I don't think I'll get to it". Basically, that system only works if you have a good way of representing to the player that their enemy is weakened, and ready for a finishing blow.

And then, today, browsing GG, I clicked on the link to Torque Motion. I'd seen it before, glancingly, but hadn't been thinking about animation then, so hadn't thought too much of it.

Now, I was more interested. I watched the video, and was blown away! Not only are the animations (including crawling, tumbling, climbing and swimming) incredible, they have lots of "wounded, holding your sides and limping" animations. Which would be perfect to use for the "off guard"/vulnerable animations! Basically, if you get into a fight with a humanoid, when they switch to those damaged animations, you know they are open for a "finishing blow". Perfect! And saves me huge amounts of time/effort.


Moments like that really highlight the benefits of working in a cool indie community like GG. And thanks Chiang Mai for their great work!