Next to the mystery detective story, The Last Premiere heavily relies on its platformer movement-system and the melee based fight system with three different weapons. A fast paced sword, a slow but brutal hammer and a swift wing-cape with long range projectiles.
Every weapon has a light and a hard attack as well as a special attack. As you progress through six different areas, you slowly unlock the weapons and their attacks.
While the sword and the hammer are simply weapons the wing cape doubles as a glider. Julie gains the ability to double jump and glide for a short amount of time which is a fun way to stay safe in battles or fall down to your demise in the underworld.
The animations are a core part of the fight and movement system. For the quick and direct weapon switching and the fast sword fighting we took inspiration from DMC: DevilMayCry. The slow and brutal weapons of Bloodborne on the other hand, were a major reference for our hammer. These two games also had a lot of influence on our movement system, especially for the way the player targets and dodges an enemy.
We also studied the brilliant pacing of Link's sword in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and took inspiration from different weapons and animations of Warframe.
In the end we tried to build a fast paced feeling without extreme unnatural movement.
The balance between realism and fast paced frame cutting action is our main nemesis and we're currently on the run to defeat it.
For someone starting with animations I can recommend the two books The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams and Game Anim: Video Game Animation Explained by Jonathan Cooper. Both books really helped us a lot with the animation basics and, especially with the timing of walk, run and jump animations.
The Game currently takes about five hours to finish. But we are still optimizing the level design, the amount and types of enemies as well as the way dialogue is incorporated into the game so as to not interfere with the fun of the gameplay.
The Last Premiere is made with the Unreal Engine 4. It has been the engine of our choice ever since we first started using it for our first student project in 2016. Unreal is very designer friendly and well documented. The visual scripting tools enable the three designers in our team to build and edit complex systems like the movement and fight system by themselves, which is a huge plus for testing and implementing animations. Also Unreal goes hand in hand with Cascadeur and Blender, the 3D modeling software we use.
During my time at the university I was encouraged to do a 3D hand-animated short story in Blender which wasn't that bad for a first time animation, but took forever. I must say that I love Blender. It's a great and powerful program, but animating with Blender as a total newby is neither easy nor fast. Blender does not forgive.
For another student project I was allowed to use our university's small Mocap-Studio. This was fun and exciting and totally overpowered. The time needed to prepare a session, to capture and to clean up the mess of every jiggly body-marker was huge and the result was hard to edit. It might have been due to our limited knowledge at that time, but it wasn't as practical as expected.
So at the beginning of our The Last Premiere journey we knew neither Blender nor Mocap was a solution and after a good and long search we found Cascadeur. It was the 2020.2b version, so no autoposing for custom skeletons and no quick rigging tool. Naturally it took us a while to figure out how to get our custom rig to work properly, but after everything was set up we were highly impressed with the workflow Cascadeur offers. It's so clean and simple and everything just makes sense. To be honest, we probably only used about half the tools Cascadeur got, but for us as animation newbies that was all we needed to get started and find a path into the animation rabbithole.
What's Next
We used the past few months to get our story and our levels straight.What we haven't really done yet are cutscenes and facial animations. We tried a short scene to test the workflow and quickly realized that we want to animate blendshapes and body animations at the same time because it's easier for us to see how a scene develops since we are still not at the level of professional animators. So that's the one thing we're really looking forward to: blendshapes in Cascadeur. Since that's already announced for further releases we will wait patiently and focus on the overall fight feedback. Also we would like to improve the existing animations a bit. Since the latest iteration there have been a lot of changes in cascadeur and in the way we animate.
If you really have been reading until here, you might be interested to know more about our future plans for The Last Premiere. There are still a few things we like to add and improve. We also visited Gamescom this year and gathered a lot of useful feedback from gamers and other developers we'd like to include. There's still a lot of work and since we're a small indie team this might take awhile.
In the meantime we are also developing a concept for a small platformer named MOTE - Mind Of the Eyes. We recently got funded for the first steps into this project and we're thrilled to have another project on the way while finalizing The Last Premiere.
If you like us to keep you updated, you can follow us on Twitter , check out our Homepage and of course add The Last Premiere to your Steam Wishlist . Every single Wishlist entry helps us a lot and reminds us to keep on fighting to make this Game the best possible version with the best possible animations it could be.
Thank you for reading all of this and thank you Cascadeur for this opportunity. You're an awesome piece of program and we're excited to see where the journey leads.
