Player Awareness

Today’s update is going to be super short because I spent the majority of the week doing some post-launch work on Super Win the Game. But I’m making up for it with a ton of GIFs, so.

This week, I continued working on new enemy designs which have brought with them a handful of new AI features.

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First up is some sort of bug thing. It spits acid? I’m still trying to figure out what the common theme among the enemies is going to be. I’m thinking some sort of insectoid alien species, but we’ll see.

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Turrets also spit acid, at least for now. They will also turn to face the player, which is the first bit of player-aware AI code I’ve written. My expectation is that enemies will largely be able to function autonomously with no need to be aware of where the player is or what they’re doing, but there will be a few exceptions, and this is one of them.

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Likewise, I’ve added player proximity tests to allow these hanging slime spawners to trigger when the player walks underneath them. I also used this functionality to create a spider enemy that behaves similarly, waiting until the player passes by to drop and attack. This required an extra bit of AI work to support a change in state from hanging motionless to dropping and moving around. To solve this, I add the ability to nest behavior sets within other behavior sets, effectively producing something akin to a standard behavior tree.

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Finally, I’ve been reacting to feedback from the first playable test build. I’ve reduced the intensity of falling gravity, tweaked movement inertia a bit, removed player knockback when striking enemies with a melee weapon, and made bombs way less bouncy. I don’t yet know when the next public test build will be ready, but hopefully these changes will be a step in the right direction.