Some more balancing today, switching between weapon balancing/testing and experimenting with some gameplay mechanics… I know they should be locked down by now, but I can’t help myself… First change in the gameplay is that shields no longer have a fail rate… It was just looking weird, and I can achieve the same actual result […]
Today I mostly worked in balancing the weapons… Not much to say about it, I basically just spawn an enemy with different weapons and different levels, and see how does it feel… Then I adjust it and try it again, over and over again… The game so far was “mathematically balanced”, which means I had […]
Carried on the work from yesterday, fine tuning the shooting mechanisms… It’s now working properly, with two easily adjusted parameters, and I even have a new parameter for the accuracy of the weapon (a machine gun shouldn’t hit as often as a pistol). The high-level enemies may still have too much accuracy, but on the […]
Working on a new AI shooting system… The current system uses a sine-wave altered by the danger level of the enemy and some parameters (frequency and threshold)… This is hard to control, and the fact that enemies shoot or not against you is dependent on where in the curve you’re at the moment… So, I […]
The AI on Gateway searches for an attack slot on the target. That’s used to stop the AIs from clustering on a single position. They request an attack slot to the target, and they keep refreshing it, until they lose it if they don’t target it anymore. Until now, the attack slots were attributed in […]
Sort off… I’m a man that made bats work in the game, that makes me Batman, right? More importantly, I’ve finished the AI refactor! All the AI is now done through the new interfaces and works so much better than before! This was the biggest task still remaining on “Phase 2”… The rest is mostly […]
Finished the AI of the robotic spawns, which chase the player around and either explode or melee attack… I should have invested more on this kind of “swarm” enemies, they’re a lot of fun! Only one type of AI remaining! Now listening to “In Existence” by “Beautiful World” Link of the Day: Another trailer for […]
And done, the new illusion system is working properly (and in the process I cleaned up a nice piece of code regarding agro management)… These are going to be good lessons for the future… The first thought that an agro-based system was simple was really wrong… It’s a powerful system, but it has a lot […]
Finished work on the “follow” AI, which is used by NPCs on missions, but also in the Illusion Generator (which spawns some illusions that get attacked instead of the player)… The AI implementation went great for a change: But in the process I found a bucket load of bugs on the illusion system… This is […]
Finished the AI refactoring for the sandworm, plus added some more balancing to it… Also added a shaking camera effect when the worm approaches, because it’s cool and I can! Three more AIs to go! Now listening to “The Nexus” by “Amaranthe” Link of the Day: This is the first video on a series on […]