

What makes a game feel alive?
A city-building strategy game thrives on detail. As a player, you want to be able to understand how your own settlement grows and comes to life. In addition to detailed buildings and a vibrant environment, animations play an immediate role in immersing oneself directly into the experience. In Endzone 2, it's important for us to continue visually depicting the lives of settlers and making all processes within the settlement readable and accessible. In this context, the term often used is the 'Wuselfaktor'. To achieve this, we have implemented several systems that enable animations of buildings and settlers within buildings.
Building Animations
To animate buildings in Endzone 2, certain precautions need to be taken. It's necessary for us to plan ahead in the visual design phase and make compromises. For instance, all objects intended to receive animation must already exist as separate sub-objects within the final building. An example of this would be the crucibles that hold the molten metal of the Iron Caster.






Fluff Paths
"Fluff paths" is our system's term for a path that is detached from the actual navmesh. This allows settlers, who typically follow their established routes, to spontaneously wander into building areas and trigger scripted animations. An example of this would be the fishing hut. A settler walks from their house to the fishing hut, where, in a scripted animation, they take a fishing rod, walk to the front of the pier, and then cast their line. This is observable in the example below, where the orange area depicts the collision or “border” of the fishery and the small blue dots are visual pointers of the coordinates to the right. Each point represents a checkpoint of the path and a possible Animation that is played there.


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