Good evening, a week late but I am here to post another devlog! No pictures or video this time because I have been very busy, and developing the AI for the game has been a complete disaster. It started off fairly simple enough, but Unreal Engine's AI Perception has some serious flaws when used in blueprints that are stopping me from being able to add in some very crucial functionality. So where did it go wrong?
To start of, I made a simple AI that will add the player as a target when perceived, and follow endlessly. Which would obviously make the game extremely tedious, so I added in an investigation loop. So if the AI has a target, but the target has broken line of sight, it will take the targets last seen location and patrol there. If it can't find the target, it will clear the target and start to patrol around the house using waypoints. For reference, all of this was setup in about a half hour. It gave me a lot of motivation, and I called it there for the day as it was a good amount of functionality, and decided to end off by adding in sprinting.
Now, when I sat down the next day I was extremely happy and determined to add to my AI, and the only "crucial" thing missing is being able to open a door. Either if the player tries to hide but is obviously in sight, or if the player locks the AI in a room it needs to be able to get out. To get things started though, I decided to quickly add in noise perception. Added triggers to the doors and drawers, and the AI could now investigate a noise trigger if it's not actively chasing the player. After this point, the game development process turned into a horror game...
I spent 3 days, and I mean way more time than I would have liked during those 3 days trying to implement door compatibility. First task was to open a door if the player closes it right in the AI's face and breaks it's movement path. This was actually fairly simple and worked immediately. The calm before the storm. Next, was to have the AI open a door while at the player's last seen location, if one exists. So, I setup a task to search around the AI for doors and set the closest one to a Blackboard entry, and then trigger the door same as before. Didn't work. Not only did it not work, but it broke previous sections of the tree even though it's all isolated tasks.
I tried restructuring the tree the next day, and for some reason even the basic simple stuff I had already setup wasn't working anymore and that entire day was 6 giant steps backwards. Then I didn't touch it for a few days. I considered removing the AI and just focusing more on the atmospheric horror side of the game (which is still a thought I'm entertaining) but tried again... I don't even have words for how angry and frustrated this process has made me. Not to mention I am facing this constant bug with Unreal Engine where the right-click context menus completely disappear from time to time and the only fix is an engine restart. Apparently it's an issue with newer Nvidia drivers, but it really leaves me wondering how much I actually want to pursue developing games at this point in time. I can't exactly up and change software as I have $1000s worth of assets which are licensed for Unreal Engine, but recent updates seems to be breaking more than they fix.
Anyway, I do plan to release something for this jam, even if it's a slightly cheaper product than I was intending. Thanks for taking the time to indulge my torturous week, and hopefully, one way or another, I will be posting at the end of the week with a final concept and ready to start a week of marketing on the side!