[blackreef Pirates] Week 49 - Enemy AI and first arena news

This is week I'm going to show you the updated enemy AI and the first arena of the game.

Enemy AI

The first step for a great enemy AI is to give them some senses. At the moment the enemies cannot use the pathfind system to find the player position but instead they're relying only on sight and hearing.

Sight is pretty easy and straightforward to implement (remember Week 15?) and the only thing I added this week is different "Field of view" when patrolling and when in combat.

This "line-of-sight" technique works fine, but...it was too easy to sneak behind an enemy unnoticed, so I added a hearing sense.

Each footstep or combat sound now emits a "sound stimulus" directed (with a maximum range) to every NPC in the game. This is useful to alert nearby NPC about a fight or something suspicios.

These "sounds stimuli" are also using the pathfind system to reach the NPCs: this way when you make some noise inside a room the NPC can hear it coming (apparently) from the door.

All this things makes me eager to add a "sneak" ability to the player...but I must resist 'cause there's no time for it now :(

The first arena

In order to achieve the "one year milestone with a game" we decided to strip down all the features that are not the core of the game.

The game that will be playable in late february is going to be focused entirely on combat and party/inventory management. This is a huge part and need to be perfectly balanced and tested before adding all the rest (story, exploration, quests, etc...).

In short: we're giving you a smaller but tasty cake istead of a bigger but half baked one. And yes, we will add the frosting later!

There will be many combat arenas and various challenges to complete. We almost completed the first arena: is pretty small and is perfect for a 1vs1 or 2vs2 introductory fights.

Ok...ok, enough talk, here's the weekly video showing some new gameplay bugs features.