I’ve had a few fights with the AI and it has been rather fun fighting a boss that can kill me quite quickly. I love a challenge but I don’t want to make the very first boss too difficult especially for newer players. That being said a lot of the difficulty comes from fighting in such a dark room, there might be ways to brighten up the place eventually (hint, wink, hint). I also added death animations to the characters so it looked cool when the player or the boss died, instead of disappearing out of existence. And I added better descriptions to two items so I could show it off in a new video. I think I might put up a video once a month to show the game’s progress.
I improved some of the AI and added features so I could make debugging easier by flipping simple switches when I need to. A lot of the values for the logic I played around with to see which felt best when fighting him. The distance in which he attacks the player, the length of his strafes, etc. It was a lot of tweaking and I’m getting to a place where it is getting smarter. I added more animations for the attacks as well, making sure there was a variety to his attacks. The more I fought it the more I understood why stamina became such a popular mechanic. It was a quick and simple way to add difficulty by having the player manage a resource besides health. It is easy to simply run away but for now I won’t implement stamina unless I can’t think of another way to make the combat less straight forward.
While I was tweaking with the death animations I got my first ever crash on Unreal, I’m surprised it took this long for it to happen. I took a picture of the last thing I saw below. I was worried I would lose some of the work I had done, but thankfully I had saved right before the crash.
Another cool thing about the behavior tree of the AI is that you can watch it fire/run as you play the game. This was really useful to see if its actions were working properly and to watch if there were any issues. I’ll start adding more actions in the coming days, and then I’ll have a real boss in my hands.
GoldenGratus Games 