Game Design–group Lycanthrope AI Bees part 1 detecting the player
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Hello Everyone. I got to work on Beelonging, in the game the player control one bee while the other six bees that are controlled by an AI and those AIs I have been working on. The AI for the non-controlled bees is an important part of our game because the aesthetic of our game needs that the player needs to perceive to have a belonging to a bigger group and hard to gain a sense of belonging to either to yourself or to static, unmoving or too unresponsive AIs.
The first part I made for the AI is the ability to detect the player. This ability went through many iterations the first large was using raycasting, this was however scraped because it was too unpredictable and had big holes on each side of the AI.
Next week I will talk about how the AI bees get together and fire: AI bees’ part 2 formation and fire
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as you can see in the picture there are four blind spots I could fix that but the lacking knowledge and time pressure lead to that raycasting were removed for circle colliders which because the second iteration and the iteration we are using now. This shift proved to be easy and to adapt to the wishes we wanted it to have. The player has two circle colliders and the AI own one circle collider, 
the reason the player has two circle collider is that one is smaller than the other and this change is done so that the AI bees can react stronger to one collider than the other. The AI drifts away for the player once they detect the bigger collider but they speed up once the player gets too close. This is done so the AI can react and give the player a good line of sight and no demand from the player to micromanage the AI. This method empowers the belief of belonging when the player uses the power up and unite the bees into one tight formation where every bee helps each other to survive.