Axe game
The axe from god of war but in your pocket
November 2019 - All I wanted was the axe from God of War, but whenever I desired it. I am obsessed with that axe. A simple hold of L2 then R2 causes Kratos to raise it behind his head and hurl it literal miles into the face of an unsuspecting foe. Then, pressing triangle, Kratos extends his arm and the axe comes swirling back to him as he catches it heroically, completing the most satisfying loop of gameplay I have seen in my entire life. I would stand on edge of the tallest mountain in Midgard and chuck the axe off the side then call it back over and over and over again. No matter how long I waited, how far away Kratos was from the axe, it always came back. I thought about it even when I wasn’t playing the game, motioning the catching of the axe like a maniac as I took my dog on his evening walk. So I put the axe from God of War in my pocket.
prototyping
One of the things I wanted to try with this project was implementing an on-screen controller. I’ve always noticed how much smartphones are shaped like GameBoys and I get really annoyed when mobile games make me use on-screen controls that block what’s happening on the screen, so I thought ‘why don’t I just dedicate half the screen to being a controller?’ Using Unity’s UI tools, importing a pack for an on screen joy-stick and programming hold-able buttons (for throwing the axe), I was able to make it work pretty well. I hope more games try this out in the future.
New tricks
With this project I also took my first crack at texturing and texture painting. It seriously confused me that I couldn’t just unfold my entire 3D model into an single undistorted piece of flatness and it took me a while to actually synthesize how UV unwrapping worked even after putting the project down. I was glad I had this first exposure to the concept— when I encountered it again my animation classes I actually had some idea of what was going on. And though I did a terrible job unwrapping my models for this game, the textures turned out surprisingly well.
Animation!
One of the things sorely missing from Hexa Hiker was rigged character animation, which I learned about in the years between working on that project and this. To accomplish my goal of having the axe from God of War in my pocket I built an elaborate state machine, managing dozens of animations that accounted for every possible interaction between the character and the axe.