The Only Certainty: Scanner Animation

I feel like I've worked on this more than anything else for this game. Oh well, they say iteration is a good thing!

When we first started working on TOC we knew we wanted the player to have a way of interacting with the environment, and the scanner idea was born. At first it was a simple ray that shot straight forward.

But eventually we decided to scrap it for something else. It had a pretty narrow range and forced you to be really precise with your aim. What if you wanted to scan several objects at once? So we tried something a little different with the pulse version.

But in the end this didn't feel right either, and scanning too many objects at once caused its own problems. We wanted a Scanner that had a deliberate direction in which to aim, but with more range than the original beam. So we tried something that fanned outward.

This one was much closer to what we were going for, so after a little refinement we have the current result:

The basic motion is almost unchanged from the 3rd version but it moves a little more smoothly and doesn't take as long to get to the fanning out motion. Works great in the current build we have so far so hopefully this is the one we can use from here on out.