One of the main elements of H.A.C.K.E.D’s development from my perspective was the creation of its enemies and my foray into Enemy Pathing.

One thing that becomes immediately clear about the game’s stage is that it is filled with twisting turns and corners, so simple scripts to move them towards the players wouldn’t cut it, not alone anyway.

With was most of my time with the game’s development: Making the Enemy’s Pathfinding AI. At first I tried using Unity’s NavMesh Agent to guide the enemies to the player, but it presented some issues. Framerate would take a deep dive into the abyss of lag, and the movement wasn’t fulfilling my objectives for the game.

I then tried Astar Pathfinding, but the time constraints the game found itself prevented me from being able to learn the plugin to use it in a satisfying manner.

I finally decided to make a simple behaviour for the enemies with my own script. I used raycast that would work akin to how people use hands to figure out where to go when on a hallway in the dark. One would be in front, checking if there is a wall in the front, while 2 on the sides would check if there are any walls on the sides. When the player would reach a wall on the front, it would move depending on which walls were free: if there was one a wall on one side, it would go the the opposing direction; and if there were no walls, it would randomly choose a direction, adding randomness to its behaviour.

This game gave me a good challenge in terms of AI, but I wouldn’t say I’m too fond of it. To be fair, the development of the game was rather stressful. I still enjoyed coding what I did.

H.A.C.K.E.D was a multiplayer asymmetrical design between Griffin, Li, and I. We thought of this team based game in which players would work together to get to an escape point. At first we thought about making it about escorting a player to an extraction point, avoiding numerous zombies that would be between the players and freedom.

We then faced the problem that we were walking relatively near to a game made by another student.

Image of Don’t Bite Me Bro.

It was then that I suggested the transition into a game in which you have to save a system from hacking. The players would be tasked into going to multiple generators in order to get the server back up and running as it should.

We divided the working load into 3 part: Visuals, Player Controls, and Enemy AI; which were handled by Griffin, Li, and I respectively. I will go into detail about the process of making the Enemies in the next post.

Well, in the second entry for Stray Dogs, I will talk about level design of the game. In Glacial World, I talked about how I designed the interactive elements of the game to be given a safe space for the player to get used to how they worked. Here I went to the next level, making every level revolve around a new mechanic, and developing how the player may interact with them.

This design practice has become prominent in newer Mario games, where the levels revolve around one core mechanic, which they may then throw away, or reuse safe in the knowledge that you will understand the inner working of the mechanic.

This practice, called “Ki-sho-ten-ketsu”, was based after a format of japanese poems, following a structure of: Beginning, Development, Twist, and Conclusion.

But back to Stray Dogs, the 2nd level was the best point in regards to the use of the technique.

The first step was introducing the mechanic, in the case of this level, the lift platforms. They can carry both the player and object to higher altitudes.

We then add more blocks, which the player needs to use the lift to stack into a tower to move forward. Managing the lift’s timing is key to accomplish this smoothly.

And finally… THE LIFT BETRAYS YOU! jokes aside, now what was a boon to your quest for food as become an obstacle, you need to move the crates through the lifts, preventing them from taking box up, lest you have to start again if you fail.

The difficulty curve wasn’t exactly smooth, but I was happy with how I managed to apply this to the game.

Stray Dogs was probably one of the most enjoyable games I worked on this semester. I grew up exposed to 2D platformers, mainly Super Mario Bros. 3, so the assignment wasn’t something I was worried about in the design sense. I was more preoccupied about the main restriction of the assignment; that it had to be about something unrelated to media.

As someone who consumes a lot of media, that became a problem early on for me.

It was later that during work, I got a message from my mother. She mentioned that we would get a visit from Tracy. She is a pitbull that my sister rescues some years ago. We tried to take her back home to Venezuela, and while we succeeded, she wasn’t able to get along with our other dogs. We luckily managed to find a home for her, so while thing didn’t end as we hoped, we got her a happy home.

That was the inspiration for my game, I remembered all the street dogs that fill the cities in Caracas. I wondered how they manage to stay alive, especially in the food crisis that the country currently finds itself in.

In the next entry I will talk about the mainly way I focused on the game’s level design.