Player Animation Controller

I started building out the player animation controller. In its current iteration, there's 8-directional movement along with 4-directional aim-locked movement. There is also a jumping animation that is played when the player jumps or falls from an edge.

There is also a landing animation, though this animation does not work well. In general, the animations related to vertical movement are not easy to read. This makes it challenging to polish the movement mechanics as I can't separate poor values in the character controller from bad animations.

Currently, the jumping and falling animations use the same state. This state is triggered when the player jumps or falls off of an edge. The major issue is with the animation itself. It's kind of dramatic and the y-position of the animation is quite high. Because of this, the transition from the jump animation to the movement blend tree creates a "cushion". This happens when the player has become grounded again, but the animation is still transitioning from jumping to moving. A secondary issue is that it's difficult to tell when the player has reached the apex of their jump.

To address these issues I'm breaking the jumping animation apart into separate jumping and falling states. The jumping state will only be triggered when the player jumps. The falling animation will be triggered when the player's y-velocity changes from a positive (>=0) value to a negative (<0) value. I'm also using an animation pose that is less dramatic and lower on the y-position. This should make jumping easier to read in general.

Another challenge is the landing animation. This is currently a separate layer and it suffers from similar issues as the jumping animation. I have decided to remove the landing animation entirely. Instead, I'll use a simple transition from the new falling animation to the movement blend tree. The plan is to improve the feel of this transition using squash and a particle effect.

Once the animations related to jumping are updated I'm planning on taking a little time to dial in the settings on the character controller. After basic character movement feels good, I'm planning on adding a few new advanced movement mechanics and several new obstacles. I'm becoming less happy with my test level because it's functionally a 2d level laid out in 3d space. I'm also finding that the overall pacing of the level (specifically the timing of the moving platforms) is just bad. I've been spending some time learning level design and have enrolled in a course on level design that I will be completing over the next week or two. I want to rebuild the test level while I work on the new movement and hazard mechanics. It's a good excuse because the test level intends to showcase each mechanic in the game anyway.