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This week the team wanted to do something a little different, and give a behind the scenes look at our #screenshotsaturday post. This week’s visual comes straight from the screen of Gene Blakefield, System Era’s resident animator.

First, let’s get caught up to where we are right now. Astroneer has multiple suits, that each have different visual styles, as well as their own characteristic movements. Orange “Pajama” suit has a short stride, while the “Bubble” suit hobbles along the surface of the planet.

Before Gene can implement all of the new animations he has cooked up though, there is a bit of work ahead to get all of the previous suits working on the same framework. Once each version of the Astroneer is on this new unifying structure, it’s going to allow him to make animations that will work for every version. Most of the stuff here you have seen before, but the part of note is that the underlying systems driving all of this stuff is getting worked on, which will make the process much easier going forward. As you can see below, each of the suits is driven by a skeleton (the black bones running through the suit), and now all of the suits are going to be using the same one. Once that is all squared away, any new animations can be applied to the game much faster.

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If you have any questions or just think Gene is great, you can reach him on twitter here!