RKSanders

Updated to v0.6 in original post. Character animations! For awhile, I wasn't sure if I wanted to make the character humanoid or not. But the allure of being able to make a 3D-Mario style pole climbing animation was too strong. I knew I would need to use root motion to make the climbing look right. Which was not how the character controller was currently set up. Adding root motion would make the character move in chunks rather than sliding smoothly and I wasn't sure how much that would mess with the game feel. I liked how you could inch slowly towards the ledge of a gap to maximize your jump distance and I didn't want to loose that. I tried to move quickly through the modeling, rigging, and animation process in case I still wanted to ditch the humanoid. I only focused on body proportions for the character's mesh. I'm still not sure what kind of art style to go with. I've been interested in trying something like Toad Treasure Tracker. It would fit will with the Mario climb and they have some cool looking world space shaders that would work well with how I've just clashed boxes together to create the level. There are a few different visual states the controller can be in: Idle, Climbing up, and Jumping. For switching sides I just rotate the character controller 180 degrees and seems fine to skip having any animations for that. The idle and leaning animations are basically just 1 frame poses. I used a blend tree, driven by the player lean input (movement.x aka left/right on joystick), to smooth out the transitions. After the animations were done and hooked up in the animator controller. It took a few code adjustments to work with the root motion. Mostly just disabling the parts that translated the character upwards, but I also had to rework how I restricted the character's max translation so it doesn't move past the top or bottom of the pole. I went with a kind of gross, but quick, fix to just clamp the character's position within the pole's height range at the end of every frame. With that root motion was working and. . . it was terrible LoL. Like I feared it completely lost the movement fidelity. There were also some other bugs introduced. Like when you jump it figures out the force to apply by looking at the characters delta speed along the pole. So if you build up some momentum on the pole you can jump further. But I didn't cap the force by some max value and now, being animation driven, the delta is much much higher. While fixing this problem it hit me the that simplest way to fix the movement problem was to just make some slower animations and blend between them. It wouldn't work with keyboard inputs but like Team Meat says "A gamepad isn't required, but neither is bathing." So screw it. I was quickly able to duplicate the animations in Maya and adjust the root movement. I also made a few tweaks like not making the arms and legs extend so much. And it worked pretty well. You can still inch forward in the game but also rapidly ascend when you're trying to get up a wall. I also added some cheats to get around the level. Right now they're manually placed points you can teleport to. If you're interested you can used them by pressing: '`' (tilde key) > cheats > and type in : Note: after you use select one you can just use the reset button to warp you back there again.

Glad you like it! Thanks for the input. I've added a new version to the original post. When I gave it to a friend and watched him screen share it, I realized I had a problem with some timescale code. The character was moving way too fast for him and resulting is jumping way too high. I've fixed that problem in this new version. So it will probably play much differently for you now. I've also made more of a proper level now that eases you into it. . . hopefully. It still goes full Foddy pretty quick I think I'll work on level and character art next. The level could really use some landmarks so when you fall you can figure out where you're at more easily. And I think adding some animation to the character will improve the game feel a lot.

Haha, looks great, I love that jump pose. You might consider changing the horizon to something that isn't yellow, Gobbler gets lost in it. Or you could give him a black outline.

Looking good! Yea, turning in some of these old style 3D games were a bit jarring. Maybe you could do something with a screen transition? Like a directional blur or screen wipe to imply turning. Or a popup icon for the direction like these:

Ball slide! LoL.

The hornshoe is so good! I could probably play a whole game with those kinds of puzzles.

Wow that's looking great! Can't wait to see how you generate the landmarks.