Educating the brain

Started the day off with a tutorial from the great Wes Bunn. He has made the best tutorials from Unreal that I have had the pleasure of watching and learning from. Whatever he teaches it sticks to me very well. Luckily I was able to find a tutorial that the did for AI last year. A lot of it was stuff I had learned from my previous AI escapades but he did a lot better to explain his processes and reasoning behind what he did. Which is why he’s my favorite teacher, he’s not afraid to slow things down and talk out what he’s doing even if he knows there might be other impatient viewers.

I learned more about how to pick apart and debug the brain of the AI, and with that I got back into my boss. For testing purposes I fight the boss as much as I can and early on something felt off, and I realized it was his range compared to the player, since you have a whip there’s a clear advantage. To try and amend this issue I made the hammer much larger. It worked out well and a brilliant unintended consequence is that if the boss hits you just right you can get launched across the arena. There was also a bug with the boss getting stuck in the stairs, I think it was drawing a line through it and trying to get to it but it was impossible to get to so it would never finish the action. After some tinkering I think I got it fixed to where I tell it to abort its action if it is in one place for too long.

The next improvement was on the boss’ brain or at least arsenal of attacks. I got some more animations from mixamo and was able to give the boss more options for combos. The wiring gets more messy as it always does, even with lots of organization some things are bound to overlap. I’ve got it doing more attacks with a wider variety. After fighting the boss in the dark it seems quite clear it is a difficult fight. I think with a few more additions on the actions of the AI it might turn out well for the very first boss. Quick and simple is my goal for this first level. It killed me fast as you can see with my life bar below.