Weekly Dev: The Game with No Name

Zobmie Shooter is becoming too generic and rather annoying. So until I can come up with a name, and really darn soon, it shall have no name. Lots of great happenings this week. All the various individual parts and pieces have finally come together for the first time.

Play Time is Over

Technically is was R&D, but the R has to be dropped in the sake of time. There’s only a few days left till October and the target is mid October release. It can happen and there will still be development time after. But I won’t release for the sake of releasing.

Compromises had to be made

I had a grand vision for a basic shooter. My home grown AI was pretty good, and it was relatively exciting. But It was also incomplete. Pathfinding, movement and any other features still needed to be in play.

I switched to Emerald AI. It is an “ok” package. It’s not the best but it will do. I can use it with their AI Spawner to have zombies and worse chase after the player in a constant stream. It didn’t do everything I wanted, soI had to make it do them. This required a lot of code modification of their monolithic spaghetti. It was easier and faster still than writing my own code. How so? I already did a lot of the work during the R&D phase and it was a literally cut and copy affair.

Opsive was not the Key.

Opsive just released their Ultimate Character Controller. I jumped the Unity Asset store release and paid the full $180 price tag. That was a mistake. Granted Justin was active and giving great support, his answers just fell short. While he also makes Behavior Designer, the UCC appears to have been made in a vacuum. Standard move, wander, seek commands were not compatible with the new controller. That was the “last straw” in my struggle to get the system working. Too many other issues, the whole item creation process by following exactly his video tutorials was bugged to unusable. If I had more time, I would have just dealt with it. But I found myself fixing his code too.

Invector and the Puppet Master win

Invector in all it’s bugs, performance issues and weirdness won out in the end. I had already done so much work integrating my AI and Puppet Master with it, I couldn’t let that all go to waste. The bullet impacts, the decals, all worked perfectly. Another design choice Opsive went full crazy with. I’d literally have to recreate every single prefab and particle effect to match up with their system. Another massive time sink. My bullet effects with sounds alone are roughly 100 prefabs that’d need rework.

Invector does it’s job very well. It deals with character movement and the weapons around it. It’s flexible and doesn’t live in it’s own tightly integrated environment. I’ll have to live with the design issues and performance issues (lack of pooling). EmeraldAI has pooling so there’s a possibility it can solve Invector.

Puppet Master works so well with Invector. The dev just released an updated integration package for it as well. Very interesting stuff going on with that front. As you will or have seen in the video, there’s a huge difference in how Puppet Master characters die, vs the non puppet master. For the non humanoid characters, I may have to call upon Ootii’s rather fantastic skeleton controller. I’ll first have to check on Puppet Master to see if that is capable to doing the job before calling on yet another technology.

It’s all Coming together

The video showed a hoard of zombies and monsters swarming the player and it was pretty epic. I need to scale that down a bit to keep optimal performance. The traps and other non chasing entities all have to work together to keep you, the player interested. Now that the AI tests are complete I can free up cycles to do level design and get the dungeon to procedurally generate. We can fill it with traps and things that go boom, sound effects and all sorts of things that have been lacking.

Thank You

This is big. The game is inching ever closer to being in a state that. Can be released with a promise of future updates, features and optimizations.

Your support is appreciated and just a little longer till this is on the App Stores.