Posts

Creating an enemy AI

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To populate the world, and have a threat that the player must avoid was the next step for me when adding to this project. I firstly researched into how to create a simple wandering  AI that would randomly walk around the world. Luckily I found a series created by a You Tuber by the name of Ryan Laley earlier this year, which highlights the steps to starting from a simple AI to patrol points and following the player once they enter the AI's field of view. The first episode of the series went over behaviour trees and navigable meshes. The behaviour tree is what tells the AI what it is it needs to do, which links into the navigable meshes. The navigable meshes acts like a volume box in Unreal that basically tells the AI the space in which it is allowed to move in the world which in this case was the box of the Third Person Example Map. This is the behaviour tree: And this shows the navigable mesh in use: This is the end result after some blueprints setting up the AI:

Intern Project-Grey box

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As I was initially a part of the internship Oak Moon were offering there is still the matter of working on the project that was set for me and the other interns before I fully start the work placement. As the level designer for our project, it was my job role to block out the level and create some game play situations for the player to deal with  such as an enemy AI or some collectables. I first examined the concept artwork for the level block out drawn by one of our intern artists: Using this block out, I went into Unreal to create a grey box version of the map so we have an idea of the scaling and placements of the assets in engine.

Starting Off

This journal will be representing the journey and experiences I will be going through during my work placement at Oak Moon Games. After discussions with both my lecturer Craig Smith, and the lead designer at Oak Moon, Alice Winter, we came to the conclusion that to complete my Specialist Collaborative Production I could work for Oak Moon as a work placement instead of the original plan of an internship. We firstly went over the project brief together and how I could incorporate that into the work I will be producing for Oak Moon, and created a schedule for the next 8 weeks. Work Placement Schedule Goals: (i) Working to a brief in collaboration with the design team to create two level blockouts for testing and asset implementation, (ii) Drafting accompanying level design documents, (iii) Assisting in game play implementation and level polish. December 2019 Week 02/12: - Fire Door Level Briefing/Discussion - Map and Walkthrough Document Drafting Week 09/12 - Map and Walkthr...