Game Development Week 8 – Blog #6 – The one with bug fixes!

This week leading up to the week 8 milestone was all about getting our features implemented and in a good condition, reducing as many bugs as possible so that the experience was as good as possible. I feel like we achieved this and with minimal issues with the game.

New features that I worked on this week were making the squad spiders retreat once they have lost their leader. I did this by getting the location of the Child and The Squads position and then finding a position in the opposite direction so that the spiders appeared to retreat. I coded this in C++ originally but during the time I had to complete this feature I was unable to get the Navmesh correctly so I instead for the purposes of the demo made the squads retreat to a specific location. This feature will be fixed this week alongside many other improvements.

Next I worked on fixing the problem the squad spiders caused for the leaders, the squad spiders were blocking the movement of the leaders making them immobile. I fixed this by borrowing a little trick that Tomas and Aleks used for the patrolling of the Leaders. I took the leaders position and made the squad spiders pick a point around the leader to patrol to, this added the feel of them scuttling around. Now the leaders can move freely without much trouble from the squads.

Two more fixes for this week was when the Wolf character growls at AI’s it would slow them down but this has prooved to be a bad implementation and next week I will be replacing it with a retreat action when the AI’s are scared. The second fix was allowing the spiders to damage the child and actually inflict their damage as insanity, I did this by calling the blueprint implementable function which calls Bradley’s C++ sanity function.

Finally for this week I added code that allows us to reset the current map to the main menu so that we can always start a fresh game, I mapped this to the select button on an xbox controller.