Well well well, hello there! And welcome to this new Weekly Update post! I'm going to be really frank with you this week was primarily a debugging one. The main gist was to really remove bugs in AI. That's about it.

I still have a bit of stuff to talk about so let's get right to it!

Game Balancing

First up I tried to start really balancing the game. This effectively means changing the stats, controller parameters among many other things. I've also tried to really change how each type of enemy feels with it.

And it's not that simple too. You really need to make the stats changes really perceivable and not just rational. This is something I've learned by reading this book.

It's not really important that you have a luck stat of 5: if you rarely get any luck at all it could have well been of 0.

This is really why playing the game can be really useful!

Challenges

Next up I've also tried to add a bit of challenge to the game. Previously the number of enemies in a room was capped to 3. While this might be a good idea for the easier difficulty it wouldn't hurt to crank it up a tad bit. I've decided to raise it up to 7...

This really was night and day! With 7 enemies things quickly got more interesting. You really need to juggle with attacking and trying not to die as fast as you can.

With 5 (as of now) types of enemies to fight this isn't as clear as it seems... Each enemy type needs to be approached with different tactics so it can quickly become quite challenging if you're not careful...

AIs

Finally, there's a bunch of new stuff with enemies themselves.

Reworked Animations

First, the default enemy got a big animation rework. I tried to really add a bit of life to its movements. This was quite the challenge, as I'm not really qualified in animation at all.

Nevertheless I'm still trying things out, and certainly, the results aren't half bad.

AI fixes

Next, I've been able to continue to fix bugs in my behaviour trees. As I said last week this particular part is quite hard to debug. It really requires a bit of brainstorming and to really take a piece of paper and plan ahead.

With all this, I was able to further define my behaviour trees and therefore make the AI a bit less dumb and a bit less chaotic.

I was even able to make them properly communicate with each other at the proper time so much so that the enemies can gang up and pursuit the player together, all while attacking and behaving their own personalized way.

Take a look at this nice video of an encounter:

It's not perfect by any means but I'm slowly getting there!

Minor Updates

Refactored my entity spawning mechanic so that its taken care of by an external class. This is perhaps a teaser to what I'm planning next...



Next Week

So next week is all going to be about that boss I keep talking about. I've already started to clean it up and even though I'm having a bit of difficulty I'm sure it's nothing impossible to fix.

Other than that I'm also trying to really shake up the game flow of a level. I'm actually noticing more and more than rather the player goes to the next room it seems that the next room gets to him first. While the more laziest of players might say that this is perfect I'm quite sure it is really boring. So a game flow redesign is in question...

After all of this is done it's your typical suspects again.

I got to say: cooking up behaviour trees isn't as simple as one might think...