Day 121: Today I have some good news! I finished the sprint. And I’m finally happy with the AI. Well, at least until a play tester will find a ton of situation I haven’t encountered… And if that’s not good enough news for you, well I don’t have anything else. I could maybe say that I finally started watching Firefly and that it kicks ass. But that’s not really important.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, “When is a game considered “made”. It’s funny because it looks like the question I asked a few weeks ago.

• Reddit post, stuff about liking the game you make. Pretty standard thread.

• Article, “Are mobile games real games?”. I liked how the article pointed that mobile games and console/PC games have completely different goals. And that the demography of those two groups are mostly separate. In end Mobile and PC/Console games don’t have much in common. Except being used in stats to congratulate ourselves about how much the industry is worth.

Tasks done:

• Finally made a decent tracking AI. It took almost all the day, but I did it. It’s crazy how every time I change this behaviour, it was better AND worse at the same time. I don’t know how many things I tried in total, but it did require a lot of ideas. Today, I end up with five major improvements:

  • First instead of casting a box of the size of the collider, I used a parameter to multiply it by around 1.3. So the enemies can detect collisions in all direction before actually being in the wall.

  • I multiplied the casting box size by the local scale of the enemy. Because if I don’t the detection is totally wrong! The exposed size of the collider doesn’t take the scale into account, so weird things were happening.

  • When the actual collider is in a wall, the bool “isWall” is set to true. Then the enemy will perform an “emergency reverse”. It sets the direction to the normal of the box cast as long has the distance of said cast is 0. When it’s not 0, it means that the casted box isn’t in the wall anymore.This solves the enormous problem I had with enemies ending up in walls.

  • When choosing the direction to avoid an obstacle (left or right), the enemy looks which direction would get you closer from the player. Then it saves the choice and don’t choose another for the obstacle. I had to make on choice by obstacle because if it’s calculated at each frame, the enemy is stuck in “parkinson indecision”. Thanks to that the AI looks much more natural. It doesn’t works as well as pathfinding would. But obviously I don’t compute a whole path so that’s to be expected.

  • Fixed a really ugly bug. When you’re not seeing enemies, their behaviour gets stopped to save perf. The problem was that the velocity was not set to 0. So when an enemy was disabled, it would continue to go in the same direction and with no wall check!

• Fixed a bug where when the enemies changed rooms sometimes it would throw an undefined index exception. It was simply because I put them in the first child of the enemy parent without any check. So when there were no children or no parent, an exception would be thrown.

• Disabled the mouse in the main scene UI. My menu are navigable with the gamepad and the keyboard only. So I did the same thing that for the main menu. I replaced the Unity Input Module by a slightly modified one with no mouse input.

Sprint end: This concludes the “technical sprint”. I pretty much fixed my tools and other bugs. That leaves the “content” and “polish” sprint before the beta milestone.

What went wrong:

• It was too long. Three weeks is really big.

• I didn’t finished in time.

• It was badly named, because I was too lazy to cut it.

• I was too depressed to work well some days

What went right:

• I made it. I’m happy with the solutions I found.

• I’m only one day late. Considering I spent two days desperately trying to learn some C++ for a test, it’s not so bad.