Week 9: Take a Look at These Hands

I had intended to use this week to finish up the hull repair mechanics from last week. Asteroid impacts can create hull breaches but you couldn't actually do anything about them. Time to fix that.

Keeping with the wry humor of the game, I added a repair putty that essentially was modeled after plastering. You pick up a putty knife, load it up with putty, and then spackle over the nearest hull breach to seal it. Obviously, the knife should show visually when it's loaded with putty versus empty, and applying putty should stop the atmosphere leak and update the visuals.

I got the mechanics working. You could pick up the knife, and go through all the steps. I was nominally happy. But I was getting a bit annoyed at the default silver and chrome FPS arms that came out of the starter project. I downloaded some new arms and they look a lot better, but you couldn't really see them, and when you picked up an item, it was kind of just floating there.

Down the Animation Rabbit Hole

I wanted the player to see their hands actually holding the tools. This seemed like a straightforward ask. But I'm still very new to everything Unreal, and making animations was honestly daunting. I had an idle animation, but the arms were down by the player's side, so I modified that first. Once I redid the idle animation, I then created "sockets" for the items to fit into. After some clever reworking of the current pick up system to use these sockets, I had items welded to the side of my new hands.

Losing My Grip

The problem was, the fuse and the putty knife have different sizes. The fuse is a bit thicker, and is more of a cylinder, while the putty knife is more of a rectangle. Which meant the fingers were all in the wrong spot, depending on whether I'd picked up the fuse or the putty knife, or if I had nothing in my hand at all.

Enter UE5's pose assets. It took a long time for me to figure out exactly how to make use of the features built right into Unreal, and I still feel like "additive" animations are beyond me. But I was able to create hand poses for each grip, and then overwrite the hand position based on what's in the hand. Now when the player picks up the fuse, their hand perfectly conforms to its size. When you pick up the putty knife, it tightens its grip.

The Complexity of Edge Cases

The reason animation is so difficult isn't because making an animation is overly hard. Once you get the basics down, making an animation is easy enough. It's all the edge cases around that animation that prove difficult. For instance, it's not just one pose for "grabbing an item", it's one pose for the fuse, one for the knife, one for empty. And when I use the console now, the hand being raised up in view meant it clipped into the screen, so I had to deal with that. And I needed a visual indicator of when putty was loaded on the knife versus when it had been used.

All these edge cases take a ton of time, and I find myself relentlessly finding places to cut corners. For example, instead of lowering your arm when you use the ship computer, I just... hide the arms until you're done. It's not AAA level but it gets the job done and I can keep making forward progress. And I think that's the life of a solo gamedev. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become an architecture villain.

What Actually Matters

The results aren't perfect, but they at least look okay. You can see your hands properly gripping tools. The putty knife visibly shows when it's loaded, even if that visual is a bit rough. Nothing clips awkwardly through anything, and in the end, I think having the hand visible makes the whole thing feel a touch more immersive. If I can find time to animate the "throwing" motion from the hand, I will, but for now, I'm moving on.

Coming Up

Now that repairing the hull is finished, that completes the first two hazards, but I have two more to come. The first is a gravity well hazard, where you'll have to keep the ship from falling into an improbable wormhole, and the second is a solar flare event where you will have to use a fire extinguisher to put out fires. Both are significant challenges in their own right, so I'll see if I can get them both done in a week or if I need to separate them into two separate features.

Either way, it's gonna be fun.