Dragon Bugs You Say?

I had an idea to use Unity’s Animation system to move one object around a city. That object would have a dragon parented to it. So even though the dragon has a lot of joints, moving it around the city would not involve animating all those joints for a huge, lengthy path. Instead, it would move the whole dragon on a single joint, and then the dragon would simply animate a flapping motion and a gliding motion, along with a launch and landing animation. Those are all short animations, but they are played during the pathing, so we really got a huge animation efficiency from my idea.

However, others wanted me to use an existing pathing system that our NPCs used, and while I thought it was possible, I knew it would not be as easy as using Unity’s Animators.

This system caused bugs. The dragon kept flying off his den without flying, and would sometimes play its flying animations while sitting at its den. Among other bugs.

So at one point, after getting dozens and dozens of bugs on this, I decided to rip out the pathing system and go with my original plan. After that, there were no bugs.

(Recently during a 3D renovation of the city, which I was not involved in, the dragon was put back on a pathing system, and now there are bugs again.)

So anyway, this game is based in reality. But just based in reality, it is very specifically not reality.

But it certainly fueled the MacGuffin in this game.

It got me to the office where the rest of the story could play out.