When I joined the Wanderstop team in 2019, the game was being made by a very small team. In terms of full time employees, I think I was #6. My job would be to rig, animate, and implement the animations of every character in the game. Eventually, years later, the animation team would grow to as many as four simultaneous people. But I didn't know that at the time - I simply knew that, like many previous projects, there was a lot of work to do and just one Me.
For this reason, my initial priority was on finding shortcuts. There's only one way you animate an ambitious, high-detail game like this as a single animator, and that's by finding ways to save yourself from having to do absolutely everything by hand. For this reason, I spent a lot of early Wanderstop dev setting up animation tech to automatically deal with a bunch of situations.
Let's explore some examples below the cut!
One of the things I've been doing over the past few weeks is going thru character emotes and tweaking the safeties I mention at the very bottom of the above post to make sure all the emotes play nice with tea holding and no one's arms are horrifically breaking due to aggressive IK. Results are worth it, I think, even if there's no guarantee anyone will/won't be holding tea during conversations where these play. Of all the procgen stuff I built for the game this one may have ended up the most stable, haha. (more on the other ones in posts to come)
