BA2A - Week 7

Week 7 Summary

Polish, polish, polish

I have continued to polish on my game, both when it comes to the level design and the gameplay itself. After attending the group critique sessions I got some really good feedback that the snow was a bit too quick, so I adjusted that and it does now indeed look a ton better. I have also done slight changes such as cleaning up my blueprints, modify the values of the player stats to enhance the gameplay, adding lots of more sounds to the game, and so on. One issue I noticed that I don't think I will be able to fix for the prototype is that the different values for the stats varies on the different computers. The reason for that is because I am using the "Tick" node to run the whole system and the "Tick" node works in the way where it every split second or so it uses the following nodes. The issue is that depending on your computer this "Tick" rate will be different depending on how high FPS you have. So if you play on a High-End gaming PC the stats will drain quicker than on a Medium spec laptop. Since this is an Prototype I will not invest time in fixing this because that would mean redoing most of the systems and I must focus on other things for now.

GIF Showing the new snow effect

Enemy AI

I have also started working with the enemy AI for the game, which in this case is the giant trolls. I found that the "Infinity Blade: Adversaries" pack had trolls in it which fit perfectly for my game. All i had to do to make them fit my snowy environment was to adjust the texture slightly so they were more blue instead of green as they are originally. To make the large all I had to do was to simply scale them up. 

Texture

To get the AI working in the game I found a excellent tutorial series, I ended up going with the AI version of his second tutorial where he shows how to create patrol AI. I did try with random AI but the giants usually ended up going to the base which is a bit unfair for the player. So I choose to go the patrol route to get a bit more control over them.

I added walking sounds to them in a similar way as for the Player, I found dinosaur walking sounds on Freesounds.org and reworked them in Sony Vegas to suit my own purposes. I also added camera shake that shakes more the closer to the troll the player is. This feature I had to ask some people to try out to get the amount of shake right. 

For the damage bit what I did was simply adding a collision box infront of the troll and if the player collides with the box the troll will play an attack animation and then the players health will be set to 0. So they will kill you in one hit. I did wish that the path finding would work a bit better than it currently does but for a prototype it's doable.

Game Pitch Document

For the Pitch document it is now mostly done, just have some further text to add. I ended up having to use Concept Art found on Internet but I will leave the source on the pages using concepts not made by me. My view on this Pitch Document is as if we are going to a AAA studio like Ubisoft to pitch the game, who knows maybe in a few years from now we are actually standing there presenting our game to a big studio so why not take this chance as practice and go all in?