Danimal I think it looks good enough as a starter medium mech, you want variety and you can tease the player with glimpses of more advanced mechs right from the game start.
As for the style, I guess you need to decide now if you are going for the battletech or the anime style, I do think you should do a mix,
battletech is based on anime, so it's not that difficult. but I see a tendency of anime to make giant robots that are humanoid mixed with others that are more machine, like the gundam (which I think looks ridiculous) is clearly just a super-robot in disguise, but there's a not-gundam that's a tank with arms. I think more exaggeration of the shapes makes for a more machine-like appearance.
Danimal start blocky and as you move to more advanced ones go more anime-y with slimmer models; reason being they are developed with better materials and tech.
I have some designs planned for the next mechs, and I might add tanks too. I'm getting better at this and learned a few lessons from this mech, like what shapes work best and where to add detail. for example, semi-rounded shapes are best, even when it's supposed to be blocky, it allows for the lines to curve slightly and looks better with the shading. I was also thinking of reworking the head, but maybe later. it uses it's own textures and material so it won't be a problem.
Danimal it´s what I have planned for my never to be developed game
there's always time
Danimal As a side note I totally dislike the mechs with exposed airplane cabins, who the hell put glass windows into something that going to get heavy gun fire?. I guess it´s "Rule of Cool" at work.
it could work for faster, less armored mechs. Again, I might rework the head because I'm still not convinced.
Danimal How will you handle the animations? since you are going modular and animating by hand I recommend you to stick to just 2 or 3 legs lenghts "skeletons" and build the legs around it instead of the opposite (shorty, normal, tall for each mech weigth category). Maybe godot can adapt skeletons? I have no idea. Same for arms, you can save yourself lots of work.
Godot has retargeting, but I'm only using it with the first units. Using a custom skeleton allows for different shapes of arms and legs and movements and more precision, but retargeting would allow reusing animations.
It is possible to swap the arms and legs of a mech and reuse the animations, for now I will make versions A and B of each mech with different configurations, like pokemon, but I could make full replacements to speed things up.
I will rework the current animations later, and additional animations can be added with more animation libraries.
there will be 3 or 4 sizes of mechs: small, medium and big. I might add a smaller size too.
Danimal Anyways, our dwarf dude is looking good and ready for a brawl.
I'll upload a video as soon as I can.
Update: I made the hitboxes and also implemented localized damage. Now parts of the mech can be destroyed and the weapons in the arms become disabled. destruction of the head, chest or legs causes the mech to be destroyed, but each has different functions so I can give them different effects. I also fixed a lot of bugs and clean up the code more, but there's more to fix.
There will be two types of mechs: electric and nuclear.
Electric mechs will have a battery pack that will run out when using electric weapons like LASERs, but will be able to continue fighting after it's depleted. nuclear mechs will be powered by a nuclear reactor and explode if the chest is destroyed, with catastrophic consequences. nuclear mechs will have infinite energy, but overheat more. they will also be more common in medium and big mechs.
I improved the shader by replacing round()
with a custom softround()
which makes soft edges. I'm not using it with the rest of the shading yet because it didn't give good results. I also implemented custom colors using an instance uniform
, mechs are now colored by team in the same material.