About the Game

About the Game


'Steam Punk Robots' will be an immersive 3D game designed to run on Mac/PC platforms. It will be compiled in Unity and coded using C# and a Plugin called Playmaker.

The theme of the game is steam punk; it features a playable character called 'Rusty', who is a Foreman in charge of the worker robots working on the space station. While working one day, small objects start to land on the station. They turn out to be transmitters transmitting a signal that turns the workers against Rusty so they can take over station. The only chance Rusty has of saving the space station and himself is to find and decommission the various transmitters controlling the worker robots, and find out who is sending the transmitters and stop them.
As the player, you take control of 'Rusty' and must work your way through a multitude of engaging levels and tasks whilst avoiding various obstacles, and the worker robots. Each level will feature three different routes of difficulty and levels can be completed by finishing any one of the routes. This gives players of all abilities the chance to play through and complete the game, whilst not impacting on their enjoyment.
Each level will have items to pick up that will aid you on your mission to complete the game. Some of these will give the player a performance boost, whilst others will be crucial to completing the level.
All the characters within the game will be created to be appealing to players of all ages. Our aim for the game is to be able to get children and adults to play it and enjoy it equally. Great care will be taken in designing characters and levels that are complicated enough to engage adults whilst simple enough to encourage children to play.

Friday, 26 October 2012

AI Development

As stated in my previous posts, this week I have been working on implementing the AI into our game. I have already outlined the importance of this part of the development and I have researched into what makes AI such an integral part of any game that features it.

To begin, i made a simple test scene which just included three objects on a plane. This was done in Unity, the software that is being used to make the game. Below is a screen shot of this scene.


The box is the enemy, while the semi circle is the player. The semi circle is controlled using the mouse and it was a test to try and get the enemy to respond to the player. For the enemy to see the player, I needed the outcome to be that the player had to be:

  • In range
  • In sightline
  • In field of vision
This test was a success and the enemy only recognised the player when all three of the above aspects were working fully.

Next I decided to implement these features into the full working test scene within our game. The requirements were the same as stated above, so the player must be within the range, sightline and field of vision of the enemy. Below is a screen shot of the two characters with the code applied.



The enemy now follows the player when it recognises him. If the player is behind an object, behind the enemy or too far away, the enemy will cease to chase him.

Having set all this up, I then spent time altering the speed of the enemy and the turning circle. It is clear that the game will need a lot of play testing to get to a stage where our target market will be able to play it. Just increasing or decreasing the enemy speed gives the game a whole different level of difficulty and this must be taken into account when planning levels.

The next stage of the AI development will be to get the enemy to attack the player and damage their health. Also, one of the main stages next will be to get the enemy to follow paths around the level. This is unfortunately unavailable to me at the moment due to me needing extra software. I hope to get this soon and get enemy navigation implemented quickly after.

Posted by Philip Rozier
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. rob27 October 2012 at 05:51

    Hi Phil

    this is progressing well. You might want to blog a proper annotated bibliographic reference, re the reply i sent Tom last week so i know you are on track with this, would be good if Tom did the same.

    rob

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown28 October 2012 at 03:39

    Thanks Rob, I will wait until you check it today. Tom

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown30 October 2012 at 01:42

    Ok, thanks for the feedback Rob. I will post on both the bibliographic reference and the dissertation proposal for your review on Sunday.

    Phil

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)