Agenda

Keeper is a story in which a long-forgotten lighthouse is awakened and joined by a spirited seabird, it embarks upon a heartening tale of unlikely companionship. This presentation focuses on the gameplay programming required to bring that spirited seabird, Twig, to life. In Keeper, Twig acts as the player's "hands" and needs to fly around her environment in a timely manner to interact with all of the game objects the player dispatches them to. This talk explores the pathfinding, spline fitting, and physics calculations used to maintain the pace of gameplay and achieve a high visual fidelity, without bloating implementation scope for a relatively small development team. The talk also discusses how programming and animation teams can work together to add more immersive elements to the flight cycle and suggests workflows for efficiently authoring navigation data.

Takeaway

The lecture reviews which specific pathfinding heuristics, spline equations, and acceleration smoothing calculations that can be used to achieve high visual fidelity locomotion for an NPC bird companion. It also provides specific tools and workflows that a small-sized team can use to implement a fixed wing flight system efficiently.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for the lecture is gameplay programmers with an interest in locomotion systems. There are no explicit prerequisites required to understand this lecture but basic familiarity with pathfinding, animation state machines, root motion, and birds may be helpful.