I’VE CREATED A MONSTER
Originally posted on FidelumGames.wordpress.com
I’ve been spending nearly all of my recent development time working on my enemies.
This and the following two sections will deal with the details of that.
The first thing I did was rework my enemy AI, again with my cubes.
I feel like my new system is much more robust, as I’m able to get a wide variety of behaviors just by modifying a few values in Unity’s inspector.
I’m able to make my enemies favor ranged combat or close quarters (or any combination of the two), physical or magical attacks, determine how often they’ll heal themselves, and how likely they are to cast buffs on themselves during or in preparation for battle. I’m also able to dictate how aggressive they are by setting the chance that they’ll become injured and retreat during battle, and for how long they’ll pursue the player. I’m also able to dictate how well they can see. All of this without ever (hopefully) having to touch the AI code again (except for bug fixes).
This system relies on a simple state machine in which the enemy can be Alerted, Unalerted or Injured. In each of these states, the AI will choose how to behave based on their preference for a particular behavior.
You can see more about this system in the pseudo-code and UML shown in the above section.
I’ll show a short video of the AI in action in the next section, but for now, have a look at the variables exposed to the inspector which determine an AI’s behavior:
WORKING MY MAGIC
My goal with my magic system is to allow myself to make everything as generic as possible so that I can easily create new spells without writing additional code, by easily adding status effects to spells, being able to reuse the same visual effects for different spells, setting whether the spell is a projectile or has an immediate effect, or combining/linking any number of spells or visual effects.
The system itself is pretty difficult to explain. Suffice to say I use ScriptableObjects, prefabs and Animation Events, and can just work within the Unity Editor to make new spells. Also, I can just drag spells into an enemy’s spell list to give them the ability to cast them.
The system itself is pretty much done (with the exception of making status effects actually dosomething), but I’ve yet to put any legitimate visual effects in. Just differently colored spheres for now.
Here’s a short video showing how customizable I’ve made spells (I have hopes of letting the player create spells while playing as well):
One thing I would like to point out that I think is kind of cool is the ‘Blood’ Magick type. This type of spell costs health instead of (or in addition to) mana to be able to cast. I see these spells being used heavily by warrior type players who have a lot of health to spare, but maybe don’t have enough mana to be proficient spellcasters.
And, here’s a video of my enemy displaying how it behaves, and how changes in its values modify its behavior.
Note that the different balls are placeholder for different spells, and the green thing is a placeholder for a physical projectile, like an arrow.
Don’t mind the bugs.
PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE
Along with all of this planning and trying to ‘do things right’ (if there is such a thing), I’ve been working on getting all of my stats set up, and having them actually be meaningful.
The need for this came out of creating the status effect portion of my spell system, which needed stats to be defined (or at least a shell of them) in order to work.
I’ve broken my stats down into three categories:
- Primary/Governing stats: These determine all secondary base stats, and base proficiencies with tertiary stats. Very D&D-ish.
- Secondary stats: Anything directly tied to primary stats. Health, Mana, Carrying Capacity, etc.
- Tertiary/Skill Stats
- Weapons & Armor (Dual wield, Ranged Weapons, Heavy Armor, etc.)
- Magick (Proficiency in different types of Magick)
- Other (Things like lockpicking, etc. If I decide to put them in the game)
The Player, enemies and NPCs all have a common set of stats, and then, of course, some that only apply to a certain character type exist only where necessary.
Nothing overly exciting here, except that I created my first custom inspector in order to make modifying stats easier.
Here’s a before and after:
This inspector lets me modify governing stats and see how it affects everything else. It also allows me to easily modify all stats and quickly restore a character’s health or mana at run time. Hopefully this saves me some time in the future.
That’s it for me. Stay tuned for more!
PS: We’ve got a new team member, but I’ll wait for him to introduce himself!