Legend of Grimrock II Blog Update: The Mummy
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We'll be facing off against some additional undead creatures in Almost Human's Legend of Grimrock sequel, one of which will apparently be a mummy, as indicated in this latest blog post on the official website. Check out the animation video:
And here is some of the text:
The first thing you are going to notice in our tour is that we animate a wide selection of very distinctive monsters for Legend of Grimrock 2, all the way from mellow jelly blobs to disgusting flying eyes to giant ogres, as seen in the image above. As you can imagine, there is no one rig we can share with all these totally distinctive monsters in the game, so every monster needs a unique custom rig. In case you are not familiar with what a rig is, I would describe it as a structure inside a character that defines the way it is animated and deformed, just like the bone and muscle structure inside our bodies. The rigs of Grimrock are built fairly simply because each one is dedicated for a specific monster, which usually means only about 10-20 clips of animation, although some monsters may have over 30 different clips. The reasoning for such quick and simple rigs is that there is no advantage in putting too much effort in building complicated rigs, only to be used for a few animation clips. It takes somewhere from 3-10 days to animate all the needed clips for a monster, depending on the complexity of the monster. So spending a week only on building the rig would double the development time per monster, which would result in fewer monsters in the game. Another good reason for using quick and simple rigs is agility in the development process. The simpler the rigs, the easier it is to modify or completely rebuild them and get back to animation as soon as possible. This approach is proving fruitful especially in a small indie studio.
Technically the rigs are built of three layers that can be seen in the animated GIF below. Oh, my apologies, may I introduce you to one of the mummies of Legend of Grimrock 2! This friendly individual is always eager to give a hand ;-) Well, he may not totally creep you out now, but I promise you that these walkers will make you scream at some point of the game, trust me ;-)
