Blog Archives

Dicked around in Scripting AI

10/24/2023

3 hours and 45 minutes
Had the dumb thought of "Let me make a basic enemy collide with player to damage and then red UI feedback" before playing some video games tonight. Made the collision and then figured there should be a basic "walk to player function".
Implemented a basic walk-to-player function within like 30 minutes of the first youtube tuto I found. Though because its brushed against Behavior Trees (something Ive always known I needed to learn), I clicked on this video and got sucked into actually trying to learn while also building a more robust AI for my enemy.... Got about halfway through before catching on not knowing what the Enum variable was (which I figured out?), but then getting lost in an information gap with the video skipping through steps with C U T S. Just show me how you did each step please T.T Maybe I could figure it out if it wasnt so late. Maybe Ill ask programmer friends tomorrow or just delete half of it and use what I got working (likely more than I needed anyway). RIP playing video games, yay micro incremental learning.

10/24/2023

like 2.5 hours I think
Did some baby LD noodling by making an interior with a door and window in the metric level yesterday. Satisfying but climbing up and down it didn't feel like gameplay without enemies/stealth, and sadly I'm a little fearful for my motivation if I dick around in scripting AI right now.
So my shower thoughts told me to implement a high story concept in-world Gutter system, "Otherworldly Perception" (OWP). Which essentially is just the dynamic LD of the clockwork mansion or time travel levels of DH2, but way less complicated. Its a system to toggle different environment assets in and out of existence (visibility and collision).
There's probably way more gameplay-feel changes that would come with this, but for now I prototyped just the function to tag actors in a level and then with Level Blueprint scripts can toggle them in and out of "existence" yay.
Also Weebly was broken and not loading last night so I typed this now and will just post tomorrow when it's hopefully not broken.

10/22/2023

An hour and a half yesterday and then I think an hour two nights before that.
In efforts kick-start LD, managed to rip away from other functions and disconnect all the item function. PLUS watched some LD Design bits on the internet that reminded me it'd be worth setting hard metrics in-mind. I basically already did with the provided grid blocks but wanted more precision.
So first I made a level map for metrics, just for measuring the player's capability, and then measured the upper and lower bounds for each climb function. From left to right, step over, fast climb, normal climb, jump to reach and then slow climb, and last unreachable for climbing height.
There was an issue with the lowest climbing where above 0.45m you didnt step up, but also below 0.75m the climb function didnt reach it so player would just jump and kind awkwardly trip forward. So most of yesterday was noodling around with BPs and numbers to fix that, Now the player discreetly either steps up or fast climbs.
Last thing was I made colored versions of the grid materials. Better motivation for building an environment meant to look like something (A grimy port-town alley, street, and coast). Though and/or clearly signpost things like different highest of ledges with different accessibility aye.