Wolf Ability Prototyping
Thanks to the player state machine I set up last week, prototyping these new abilities was much faster than it would've been. Including Lock-breaking, I managed to put together 4 different abilities:
In the video you can also see that a proper model and rig for Yin was finally implemented, as well as a visual effect for them teleporting in. This was done with a material shader and a blueprint timeline, based on a tutorial I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR3flKges_A
Collectable Currency
Some feedback we were getting from many people was that they felt there was little reason to explore most of the areas in our game, despite there being multiple optional paths. For many, the optional dialogue in these areas didn't provide enough of an incentive to explore, especially since there was no way of knowing there would be any in advance.
In our weekly team meeting we spent some time suggesting incentives for exploration. Since we were already planning on having some sort of system for gaining Wolf Abilities, I suggested adding a form of collectable currency that would be spent on unlocking them. We could scatter them throughout the level and encourage the player to
Improving Enemy Positioning
Building off my earlier experiments with EQS, I tried another technique to improve the way enemies position around the player.
Now when an enemy queries the positions around the player, it spawns an invisible "ClaimMarker" actor at the best spot.
The query itself filters out positions that are within a certain distance to any existing ClaimMarker actors.
When the enemy reaches its target location, or in the event it gets interrupted, it will delete its ClaimMarker.
The idea is to prevent enemies from trying to move towards a point that another enemy is already moving towards.
Unfortunately, this approach had a few issues:
Points are generated + queried per enemy, at different intervals, not always up-to-date or consistent
System isn’t centralized, so claimed points have to be tracked by each enemy at all times + hard to have enemies adapt to changes in player location
Leads to buggy behaviour
Still no way of managing attacks timings
So once again, I went off to try and find any other methods or solutions for implementing this kind of system. This time, I managed to find a particularly in-depth and helpful resource in an online chapter of Game AI Pro, "Beyond the Kung-fu Circle".
In it, developer Michael Dawe describes the approach taken to managing enemy attacks and positioning in the game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The overall system is a bit too complex to fully describe here, but one of the aspects the chapter emphasizes is the advantages of using a centralized managing system to track which enemies can attack at a given time.
Reading through this gave me some very helpful tips and ideas of how I could implement a similar system in Unreal. However, I still have to weigh up the costs and benefits of trying to develop such a system, since it would likely take a significant amount of work and time. For now I will probably prioritize working on other parts of the game.