Hello everyone and welcome to our end of week devlog for Dead Heat.

This week was focused on Sonja and Lilith's bone setup for future animations. Before now, the girls were using Mixamo bone animations for their models. These bones worked well, but we wanted them to have their own skeleton for ease of management and future unique animations.

We began with adding a new skeleton to Lilith's blank model. We tried the model out with some blank generic skinless humanoid animations we acquired from one of AC's demo projects. Making sure that everything was ready for skinless animations, we went back to mixamo to grab some skinless animations to use with the new skeletons.

When we were happy with how Lilith's bones turned out, we added a new skeleton to Sonja. 

With Sonja, we will be modifying her animation to wave her skirt behind her as she walks and runs. You will be seeing that on our twitter hopefully soon!

After testing the new skeletons, we took some time to work on improving the alleyway animations. Now that we could add in animations, we tested them to see what could be better. Cam 2 was lacking the flickering light effect from the 2D demo. Randomly generating the flickering would be a great feature, but implementing that would be new territory for us so, for now, we have a timed flicker.

We also worked on two new shots that we will be experimenting with in the next week. A top-down view that's intended to replace the 3rd camera angle with one that gives better visibility.

The previous angle would reveal Leon's face to the player with Sonja and Lilith walking down. However, this angle was difficult to navigate after the reveal and would only be used once. We would need a replacement shot for after the reveal that is more manageable. Another single use shot we will be experimenting with is a window view from the apartment.

This shot could act as a replacement for Cam_3 as it provides a larger view for the player. We will test out the two and see which feels better. You will defiantly be seeing the results on our twitter.

Thank you for reading our end of week devlog for Dead Heat!