Capstone Update 6: Challenge 1

It has been far too long since my last Capstone post, and I left things on a bit of a cliffhanger too! Thankfully, we passed Stage 1 last week. This next stage, known as the 'Deep Dive', is mostly about a mix of research and fleshing out the gameplay from Stage 1. I'm going to take this post to focus more on the latter, because I haven't shown off this demo yet.

The Restocker Demo

When I made my last post, the restocker demo was nothing more than an idea. Since then, we've made huge strides developing it into an actual game.

Our Beloved Hero

Making AI for our game has been quite the learning experience. Currently, I find that the one thing that UE4 really lacks is good tutorials. The current tutorials that exist are all right, but they lack a certain depth and level of detail that I'd like to see. I think the situation will improve with time, but for now we've been figuring out a lot through trial and error.

With that said, we do have a nice base to build on.

The hero has a basic but effective loop that it follows. Once every 1/2 second:

1. The hero checks through all the objects that it cares about (The restocker, the enemies, and the items), and removes everything that it can't see.
2. If the list still has objects in it, choose the closest object to target.
3. Otherwise, choose the next node on the path to the level exit.

Between these searches, the hero walks towards its' current target. By making all of the hero's interactions collision-based, it results in an easy to make system where the hero interacts with the items the player places (you can even lead it around) without ever getting stuck or lost.

Right now we're aiming for another challenge tomorrow, although it's hard to say whether or not we'll be completely ready by then.