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For this post we’ll take a look at the checkpoint of the game. Idea of a 3D printer, “printing” the character as it resapwns. The overall design of the checkpoint would be two plates, one for each player, where they could respawn, and a terminal in the middle indicating the function of the object as well as if it had been activated by the players. First of all when creating the checkpoint was creating the sprites for the checkpoint. All in all it consisted of 3 main pieces, as well as additional pieces for the text, cross and particles. The basic setup can be seen in the picture below.
 The animation for the checkpoint was done in two parts. First was creating an animation for the respawning character, the idle pose simply cut off at even intervals to represent the “printing” action. The speed of this animation would determine the speed of the checkpoint’s moving part that would hide the cut-off end of the respawning character’s sprite. The second part was the animation of the checkpoint itself. This was done in unity, and mostly a matter of setting the parts up as they should be, and creating a hierarchy for them. Then I created an animation and started animating the checkpoint’s moving part to match the player animation. To create more interesting movement for the printer I altered the interpolation between keyframes using the curves available in Unity’s Animation. This allowed for the movements to ease into and out of the movement, instead of having a constant, and rather stiff, velocity. This required minor changes to the player animation as well, as this altered the timing, but this could also be altered in Unity since it was only the timing of the sprites that had to be altered, not the sprites themselves. The final touch was to att a particle system as well as a ray of light to mimic a printer’s movement. (Although it may really look more like a scanner’s movement, it ended up looking pretty good). Below is a gif showing something along the lines of what it looks like implemented and moving:
The Print-U in action.
The animation as shown (in rather poor quality, and at an absolutely horrible framerate, sorry about that, but I don’t think Unity was made to make gifs) is not the final animation as implemented into the game. The particle system was tweeked a bit, and the glowing ray had not yet been implemented. As it is in-game it really looks rather good. I’ll try to update the animation in this post if I get the time.
 
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