Weekly State of the Repo - v0.02.02

Last week’s sprint was successful, and essentially all of the core mechanics shared between the different concepts have been implemented. We were finally able to complete some informal and formal QA testing and received good feedback about the direction we should be heading.

None of the tasks last week were so challenging that they stand out in retrospect as being too difficult. One important thing that we tried was a pre-sprint planning session on Wednesdays. Because our class is 8:00am on Thursday and all of us have full schedules for the rest of the day, we struggled the previous weeks to ensure we had a properly planned sprint by the end of the day when our task list was due. This week, we learned that it is significantly easier if we meet on Wednesday afternoons and plan out our tasks for the coming sprint with some room for flexibility based on feedback in-class.

Rather than include a ton of text about this week, I’m going to present a more visual summary of the game state.

Weapon Menus

First is the pretty “weapon choice” menu mockup for players to choose their weapon parts for our “build your custom gun from the start” prototype.

Though a lot of the visuals of this menu could change depending on the art direction we go (and how our artist feels about the UI later), the important proof-of-concept aspect is present. This menu is mostly hand-crafted to ensure the best user experience and would require updates in the scene when/if we add more weapon parts. This stands in start contrast to our debug menu:

This version of the parts menu was also a task for me this week. The idea of it is to allow our designer to iterate as equally as possible in this little “sandbox” level. It uses Resources.LoadAll() with a type parameter to get the list of possible items. I also explored using Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll(), but decided that I would rather keep the weapon part prefabs in the Resources folder than allow the menu to only ever be used in-editor, as using the former function required access to the PrefabUtility to ensure only prefabs were listed in the menu.

Artificial Opponents

The other biggest task for this week was the AI that we need for all of our concepts. Below is a video of the AI in action.

By far the biggest challenge this week was the navigation of the AI. Though my previous AI class at Champlain had us do things like implement flocking and A* for creating AI movement, we never discussed how to decide where the AI should move. My final solution was heavily inspired by a blog post entitled “Implementing robust AI for SecondHand: Enemy Positioning” by Radu Cristea at Rikodu.

Essentially, the AI evaluates a series of positions around the player. It first discards any that are invalid (off the navmesh or cannot see the player). Then, it runs a series of evaluators on the positions to “score” them; one evaluator gives a high score for positions closer to the player’s field of view (using the dot product with the player’s forward vector), while another prefers positions a certain distance away from the player and another prefers positions close to where the AI currently is to avoid moving around too much. All of these weights and values (as well as another 11 parameters about the AI) are tweakable by the design team.

In order to reduce computational overhead, the AI only runs this position evaluation when it needs to find a new position to seek to. It determines this based on the current state the AI is in, how much the player has moved since the last time this was run, and simply how long it has been (in seconds) since the last time it checked. All of these values are tweakable as well, and when we have a more solid design they will most certainly be changed. With enough optimization, it’s possible that these calculations can be run nearly every frame. Another improvement is that the AI currently does not take into consideration the position of the other AI units when moving; this is something that will have to be changed for realistic behavior or “squad” behavior.

What Remains

The remaining time for this week will be spent working on weapon part durability and degradation for one of the prototypes, as well as ensuring that enemies are able to drop weapon parts that the player can pick up. Overall, I am confident that we will have another successful sprint and we are lining ourselves up to challenge the initial stage soon, with three very strong divergent prototypes ready within the next week or so.