GAME STARTER
Development Info
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Development time: 2 weeks
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 4.27​
Platform: PC
Team size: 5
Responsibilities
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Designed and coded all of the AI used in the level
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Designed various other mechanics
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Sound and visual effects
Design Goals for AI
When I designed the AI for this game, I wanted their appearance to reflect their danger level and their combat mechanics. The enemies that I designed were meant to fit with our game's style of a movement-based first-person shooter, with some enemies having effects like slowing down or stunning the player.
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Quad Bot
I designed the Quad Bot to be the first and weakest enemy that the player encounters. The shot one low damage projectile at a time that does little damage to the player.
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Battle Droid
Battle droids were designed to be advanced enemies for the player to face. They shot 3 projectiles with one attack that did more damage than the Quad Bot's projectiles and they had significantly more health. When I made different enemy types I chose to use the Battle Droid as a template for their designs.
Ice Droid
The Ice Droid is identical to the Battle Droid with the key difference being that Ice Droids slows the player's movement speed with their projectiles in addition to doing damage. I wanted to communicate this by making the Ice Droid an Ice blue color and having its feet look like sleds.
Drone
The Drones were designed to be weak enemies that fly up and down. Like the Quad Bot shot only one projectile and could be in one hit but the drone had a higher fire rate than the Quad Bot.
Electric Droid
The Electric Droid was designed to be the final boss of the level. Unlike other enemies in the level, the Electric Droid has various weak spots that the player can shoot to deal extra damage. This is expressed through various glowing components on the Electric Droid's body. The Electric Droid only turns to face the player because the Electric Droid's boss arena has jump and boost pads that the player must use to access the bosses weak spots, dodge projectiles, and get to ammo and health pickups. The Electric Droid is able to shoot a shock projectile from a cannon on its body that is able to stop the player from moving for a short amount of time.
Code Breakdown
Introduction and Enemy Behavior Breakdown
Enemy Attack Code Breakdown
Health and Damage Code Breakdown
Ammo and Health Pickup Code Breakdown
Postmortem
Design Challenges: One of the biggest design challenges I faced during this project was learning how to code AI in Unreal Engine 4. I had very little knowledge of AI controllers and behavior trees so, a majority of the code was done in the pawn blueprint. While the AI worked fine for the project working more with AI in future projects has made me realize that the AI in this project could have been coded better. Another problem I encountered was the AI movement, but this was due to the AI being made of geometry meshes rather than being a skeletal mesh.
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Conclusion: Overall, I found this project to be a fun and valuable learning experience. This was the project that awaken my love for enemy design has was my first experience working with level designers and system designers to make a game.
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