Two Brothers Iteration 5

This week I got the start of the AI working. I got a ship simply able to move to a point. I do this by finding the direction between the ship and the desired point and rotation towards it. I make sure to take the ship mobility into account so that it moves within the same constraints as a real player. I also started writing my A* path finding algorithm which will allow me to navigate the node graph.

Two Brothers Iteration 4

This week I spent primary on researching the AI. What I am thinking right now is using a node graph to allow the ships to navigate the map. This way they will intelligently move around big structures and obstacles before even getting close to them. On top of this I want to add a avoidance algorithm that allows the ship to avoid things that are right in front of him. The combination of these will hopefully leave to a ship that is able to navigate the map without instantly dying.

Two Brothers Iteration 3

Last week I spent a good amount of time working on the networking systems for the game. I integrated networking into the split screen selection system. This way players could join and see each other choose different colors and y-axis inverted over the network. I also spent some time working on the network initialization of players, sending inputs over and working on the movement of the player ships. I was getting close to a point to start showing the basic networking aspects but during yesterdays class we decided networking would not be worth it given our resources. As much as I enjoy networking I agreed with the reasons not to do it. Instead I will start to look into creating AI for the ships in the upcoming weeks.

Two Brothers Iteration 2

This week I started working on the networking aspects. At first I had some trouble just testing the build because I do not have a controller and there are no keyboard controls. Paul said that he was going to work on adding them this week. Because of that I spent the first week getting a feel for the code base and creating the background systems for networking such as the lobby system. Given this start it seams reasonable that I will have prototype networking up and ready two weeks from now.

Two Brothers Iteration 1

This is the first week I will be working with my new team, Two Brothers. Here is a video of what they had at the end of last semester.

The first thing my team asked me to do was look into weather or not networking is reasonable. There are some definite challenges given the nature of this game. Such as important twitch movement and having trails work over the network. I'll talk with lawson and keep these things in mind to see if it is reasonable.

Screams From The West Iteration 7

This week the main thing we wanted to focus on was getting rid of the gun without getting rid of the gun. We felt that the gun was taking over the game in a way we did not want. When someone saw our game they saw it as a shooter more than anything else. We wanted the gun originally to be a side mechanic but there were a few things preventing this from happening.

When you first started the game the first thing you saw was an aiming reticle and the ability to shoot. This instantly told our players, hey you should be shooting things. Another thing was that we punished our players for having the lantern out. The lantern provided more light so we said it should burn fuel constantly. This lead to forcing players to have the gun mode out 90% of the time. This, along with spiders roaming around, made it very clear to the player that they should be using the gun as their primary mechanic.

In order to make our game not a shooter we made a few changes this week. We increased the crowd control abilities the player could use on the spiders. We also removed the constant drain of the lantern so that players could keep it out as their primary weapon. We added an investigation state where the spiders stop attacking players to investigate sounds they have heard. We also made the game start with the lantern out so the players would feel that it is more about the lantern then the gun.

The above video shows the increased crowd control I made for the spiders. When the player uses the lantern the spiders now get dazed and then stunned. While dazed they move in random directions for a random increments of time giving a very confused look. It took a while to get these values to look good but in the end I thought it came out nice. The other thing we added is the torches and flares now also stun the spiders. When the torch first gets planted any spiders near it will get stunned. When the flare hits the ground all spiders close to the flare will get stunned. This will give the player more options when trying to escape the spider.

The video also shows briefly the throwing of a glass bottle. We did not have an art asset for this yet so it is just a small rectangle. What it does is that all spiders within a certain distance go towards where it landed. Once they get close enough they resume normal action. We also made a similar thing happen when the player shoots. This will give players more options on how to manipulate spiders out of the way of their objectives.

We felt this was a good step forward but at the end of the week, after our presentation we decided more still could be done. As it is currently the gun still kills the spider. We decided that this was not the feel we wanted so we are planning on changing it so that the gun also just stops the spider briefly like many of or other effects.

Screams From The West Iteration 6

This week the first thing I wanted to do was stabilize the networking. Last week I got basic functionality working, which was great but there was still a lot to be done to get the complete network experience. Kyle was able to quickly get it into testing and get me feedback on what wasn't working. I already knew most of these things were not done but it was nice to get a list of things that did not work.

So I spent most of the week fixing these bugs. This included things like making replay ability. In order to do this I had to make sure that anything that was created or could be destroyed during game play was destroyed at the end of the game. I also had to make sure things that needed to be there that could be destroyed such as pick ups and egg sacs were created at the beginning of a match. This was the most challenging part, the rest of it was just bugs that took some debugging.

After this I wanted to add another goal to show off what we wanted to do with procedural generation. What we decided would be good to add was collecting gold because this would be simple and still show our intentions. There are a bunch of empty game objects around the map where the gold can spawn. The amount of gold that spawns and the amount required are dependent on the number of players. I also made it so the egg sacs spawn at random preset locations and the number of them dependent on the number of players. Later both of these will also depend on difficulty settings.