Devlog 3: Gameplay 🎮

Introduction

Hello to our loyal fans! This week we have some exciting news to share; we have made our first playable prototype with a complete game loop that you can check out for yoursel now! Now you get to chose; continue reading or jump straight into the game. We know, we know, you reaaaalllyy want to play Kidults. But stay with us! We promise to not disappoint with this week's updates. After that, you can take as much time as you want with our prototype!

Coding

Movement & Leaning

Last week we experimented with the controls for the top player. This week we decided something as simple as leaning in a given direction is more than sufficient! Combined with the heavily physics simulated environement, we get the following result.

Basic walking AI

One of the first things that you will have to do once you start the game is getting a ticket from the ticket booth. Now this mechanic seems very simple in theory but there is a lot of stuff to take in account:

• How long should every NPC stay for buying a ticket?
• What will the AI do after he/she buys the ticket?
• Does he/she  go away and just stay somewhere where he cannot reach you?
• Does he/she just resume to his base behavior and just walk around?

We decided that the best option will be to just make them resume the behavior. If they resume their AI behavior that means that there will be an additional layer of difficulty trying to avoid them which should make the game more fun.

Guard AI

For the guard AI we can go very in depth, since we are using Unreal Engine we can make use of its powerful pawn sensing system. We decided to go simple at first and if we have time we will go more in depth and add new things like AI guards reacting to sounds, or maybe even smells.

The first thing we designed was how will the guard detect the player, our solution was to have a detection meter, the higher the detection meter the more aware are the guards of our players.

For the detection meter we will have 3 stages which will represent the guards actions.

• Normal (Will walk around, they will not care about you at all unless you are in their view cone)
• Aware (Will walk faster and will not stop that often from investigating, it will also go to the last known position of the player)
• Following (Will follow the player and if it approaches the player it will catch him)

Now we have to discuss how we will increase the detection meter. There will be 2 ways to increase the detection meter, one is still to be discussed if there is enough time for development and one is already set in stone and being worked on.

The view cone: This is set in stone, there will be 3 areas in the AI view-cone, far, medium and close. The logic is simple, the closer you are to the guard the faster he will detect you and will change his behavior depending on the 3 stages we discussed before.

This is a really cool mechanic, it is also not that hard to implement but we will focus on the main mechanics first before we go into smaller details like this. This will basically just increase the detection meter by some amount of % for a small period of time until it goes back to normal.

Art

This week Artists were focusing on finishing the Art Bible, helping our programmers by making characters and props for them as well as  rigging and writing out the Game Design Document and the Tech Doc.

Patricija finished the Artbible and applied the feedback that was given to us by our coatches, while consulting other group members. She also made the rig for the guard and made some animation frames for the Programmers to use in the engine and wrote some parts of the Game Design Document.

See you all next week!