Rubber Crossbow

This post is a bit late, we finished this project a few weeks ago, and I’m now working on an entirely different project that I hope to write some about in the future. However, I still wanted to post this final artifact report/description thing that I wrote. Good day.

For the main characters primary weapon, we chose a crossbow that fires needles. I didn’t put that very much effort into designing the the looks of the weapon, I simply went for a traditional medieval crossbow, simplified it and put some exaggeration into the shapes to make it fit the style. The animation on the other hand, I decided to put some extra thought into.

I could have just made a simple ‘bend back, then release’ animation and I think it would have done just fine. After all, it was just a weapon, and was not to be the center of the players attention.  However, I don’t think It would have lived up to the quality and mood of the other animations, so I wanted to try something a bit goofier.

I decided to make the crossbow launch the needles from inside the crossbow like a gun instead of having them laying on top. This was mostly due to save us the work of making some visualization of the crossbow being loaded. I had played with a few ideas to make the needles appear on top of the crossbow before shooting, but none of them were very good, and they were all too time consuming. The gun hybrid also reinforces the fantasy of surreal cartoons, so it worked out really well anyway.

In the animation, I made the entire crossbow pull back squashing in anticipation, then push forward with the volume traveling from the back of the crossbow towards the front, and then out, as if the crossbow was spitting out cannon balls. The Result looked quite good, but was a bit over the top. Since the main character would hold the crossbow still,  due to how he is assembled, I believed it would look very odd if the crossbows animation would appear as if it was to produce a lot of recoil, without delivering any visual kickback. I decided to not have the entire crossbow pull back as much, and instead just focus on the volume building up in the back and shooting forward.

The final animation was pretty much what I wanted when I made it about a month ago, and I was really happy with it. Looking back on it now however, I don’t really understand what’s going on with the crossbow arms. I guess they’re sort of snapping back and jerking the needle forward, but I can honestly not remember what I was thinking when I decided to make them move that way. I think it might be the string that is confusing, the arms don’t really seem to work with the string, but instead only react to the movement of the crossbow stock. Anyway, the flaws are not very noticeable in game, and the overall animation runs smoothly with the others, so I believe this is a mission accomplished.