The one with the waggly tail

In the spirit of chitchatting about stuff I haven’t done before/prattled on about here, today I will be covering something that gave me its own special brand of trouble.

Opponent characters!

This is a Guard Dog.

A loyal but some what moronic individual that patrols the many allotments of Bunny Robber – obviously because of the outbreak of thieving rabbits.

The problem was that I needed the character to follow 8 pre-set paths.
Presumably I could use Unity’s ‘path’ system to control its movement, and give each its own unique path – but this was not something that allowed for a great deal of speed, for two reasons.

1) I would have to create an individual path for each guard Dog.

2) The animations would have to be tweaked for each

motions such as turning corners would be at different times for different paths, and unless the speed could be controlled (which would presumably take a lot of tweaking to get it to be uniform) – The walk cycles would move at the same speed while the character moves at different speeds.

The solution? Animation!

Each of the 8 paths where fully animated – the timing was right, and this would mean I would simply have to change the animation preset on the model in Unity.

The extra benefit of this is that parts of the level can all be uniformly sized – making the creation of new levels fairly quick.