Week 5

This week has been hectic to say the least, we’ve been working on a lot. In order to show the massive improvements we’ve made all together, I made a video.

For the A.I part.

I made minor changes for the first A.I by taking away the hear function and the guard target. The first enemy A.I now only sits in the shadow, waiting for you to appear in their view range and then moving into position to start attacking.

Relatively simple. There are plans for the first enemy, “Hashara”, to have their own spell in order to code better collision code so their spells wont ever hurt them nor will they collide. By implementing that, and their textures and animations, the enemy will be done.

For the second A.I, most of the design of the original behavior tree with some changes done to the public variables such as movement speed, attack speed, attack damage, and attack range.

The boss is most likely finished except for the animations and the diversity of spells. What will be different is the fight itself, I cannot go into detail because I am having my meeting with the lead designer and lead programmer next week.

This meeting, and the one I am having afterwards with my mentor, is a crucial method I am using to talk about the original design, how the design looks so far, what I need to do later on.

The meetings uses the method qualitative forms with these questions so far;

First meeting

1. Give me a general description of the character and its purpose in the game world (be as detailed as possible about its behavior).
2. Where is it situated? In what environment?
3. What do you want to alter when you balance the game?
4. What are the long term plans for this A.I?

Mid meeting

1. Are the required actions for the enemy A.I sufficient?
2. (Programmer) How much am I able to import to the next enemy A.I?
3. Are there any details you would like to add to the character?
4. Are the public variables available good enough?

These questions are not even researched before, I have to find sources on A.I design in general and specifically on third person adventure games in order to actually make my dissertation well made. I will next week to look for sources and try to get some.

It will be interesting to see how far this will go =).

I’ll be blogging next week about how the meeting went and what the plan will be until the last week before GGC.