April’s here, and so we’re inching closer and closer to the end of the semester. This week’s the Beta milestone and in addition to that, we’re bringing Keeper to PAX East. I’ve been attending PAX for the last four years, so I’m stoked to finally be showing a game there. Ironically, this is the first year I’ve decided not to go to the expo. I knew this month would crammed with work and deadlines, so it wasn’t really an option for me. But Alex, Maggie, and Steven will be there representing the team at the MassDigi booth on Saturday!

On the animation side of things, I’ve rigged and created first pass animations for our final two characters; Alder the red-spotted newt, and Myrtle the monarch butterfly. Alder’s this sleepy artist-type, who arrives at the garden midway through the game. And Myrtle is this old wizard-type who appears in the new meadow area at the end of the game.

For Alder, I’ve created four different animations. He has the standard idle and talk animations, as well as two transitional animations.

And Myrtle just has the standard idle and talk.

I also worked on bees this week. Several weeks ago I rigged and animated our standard honey bee. But there’s going to be more than just honey bees in this garden. Christie’s modeled seven unique looking bee species. So using the rig of the basic honey bee, I’ve weight-painted the rest of the bees to use the same joint skeleton.

In-engine, we’ll be able to tie each bee model/rig to the honey bee’s animations. This way we can have each bee species look unique (like the small carpenter bee and long-horned bee above), without having to recreate animations for each one.