Introducing the Guard Unit(s)

CraBot was the first enemy type we made for the game and it is quite a straightforward melee class enemy unit that chases you around and tries to slice you to bits with its claws.

Guards on the other hand are more diverse enemies that have a wide variety of tricks up their sleeves. They form the back bone of the Island Delta security. They are very aggressive units and will gun down any intruders on sight. They will also knock you down should you get too close.

So far there are three different variations of guards with unique behavior on each. They use different weapons in a different way, have varied mobility, endurance, speed, and react differently to outside triggers. Fourth variation will be worked on later, but first we have to get these current bastards working fully for our big August build. There's still plenty of work to be done regarding their weapon arsenal and how to make them more "humanlike” in behavior, but you can expect another post when there is more to show!

The model, rigging and textures

The model and the rig are both very simple as you can see, but they are quite easy to modify to create variations of the unit. I've made some extra effort in designing the human rigs to be flexible enough to be able to reuse and target animations from different characters to another in case I need to (=same controls, constant naming scheme, etc.) This will be useful especially for civilian and worker characters later on. Fortunately Blender is very flexible and makes things easy, but sometimes you just need some manual tweaking or the results might get psychedelic:

Animating these guys is a lot fun. I find myself working on idle animations a bit too much, but I believe they add a lot of character. Here's a small clip of some of the guard animations:

Big guards and new environment assets

As usual, thanks for viewing!