Tutorial 2 (spooky)

This tutorial was about importing animation into unity. I started off with the sunny, whimsical scene that I have created in the previous tutorial:

However, after adding the human that I made into the scene, by chance, the human appeared giant which made me wonder if he should really be the player or if he could be something else entirely. After playing a bit with his colouring he started giving me golem or troll vibes so I decided to go with the troll by the bridge scene. I have spent considerable amount of time playing with the lights and textures and got to the point the troll was looking at the player and waving.

Pretty spooky. Then I decided to actually read the tutorial work. Apparently I was supposed to make some sort of a player that would trigger specific animations with their actions on themselves by doing specific actions rather than a part of the scene being animated. This gave me a new perspective. Instead of being the spooked traveller who is looking at the troll by the bridge, the player would be the troll (since I don't have any other animations and models lol). I cooked up a quick player movement/animation control script that used a struct for stats so I could start moving around and doing things. It turned out to be quite nice and slick.

I implemented player movement similar to the old doom games (player can move forward and backwards but instead of going side to side a and d rotates the player) with the important change of making walking back twice as slow as walking forward. The idea behind those controls was to make the player feel almost forced to just move forward by their size. Trolls don't walk backwards much, nor do the strafe, not very trolly. When the player did walk, the walking animation would play. I only had the animation for forwards walking so that fit nicely. I also decided to leave the camera stationary to create a feeling of a story of a bypassing caravan/group being attacked by a troll. Originally I was going to attach the camera to the troll but that would be too immersive for my liking. Never before was I concerned with making an experience too immersive.

The last touch to the player movement was a dash. No one is scared of a slow monster in the dark. The reason darkness is scary is that you might discover that something or someone might be right near you or that something can jump at you before you can react. If you are big you cannot sneak up and if you are slow you cannot reach anyone before they react. My solution was to include a dash, however, if I got more time to work on the project I would prefer to change it to something more like a teleportation. After dashing the troll would wave to signify its new position.