Week 6/12 - Wrapping it up with a bow...

Welcome back guys to the final week of ratman.

This week has been absolutely crazy as my team and I rush to finish ratman in under 1 week.

So, to get started this week I decided to re-design the level tiles in Autodesk Maya. I designed several tiles based on 6 sided cubes and culled the bottoms from all of them, since we never need to render under the maze. Then I went and culled selected sides on the tiles so we get something like this. The first image 1x4 unit pipe object. It has faces on 3 sides, the top, left and right, but not the ends or bottom.

I then went and made some 1x1 tiles that were missing selected sides so that we control exactly how many faces of the maze are visible to the player at any given time. The second and third images are a 1x1 end cap tile for sealing the ends of these pipe objects

As you can see, it's missing faces on only the bottom and front facing faces. It also has a face on the other end, but you can't see it because we are looking at it's other side.

When all of the maze pieces are assembled, it looks a bit like this fourth image to the game camera.

The fifth image was taken under the maze, and as you can see, we don't render what we can't see.

Moving on, I also implemented the player health and also a way to track how many cheese crumbs are left in the level. When the player picks up a cheese crumb, the player deletes that object and then tells the game manager to increment his score and also remove 1 from the crumb count. These values are displayed to the UI and accessed from the menu scripts designed by my teammates. Lastly, I worked on fixing some the the AI, and I went through and implemented a few behaviors for each enemy. Each enemy has 4 behaviors. Normal -  The enemy will navigate around the map via randomly assigned waypoints. Follow - The player will randomly choose a player and start following him for a certain amount of time, or until the catch that player. Flank - The enemy will follow the player, but it will set it's waypoint to a random coordinate 5 tiles in a square box around the player to block his path. Scared - The enemy will do normal behavior but when the player touches the enemy after collecting a super cheese, the enemy will return to the base similar to how the ghosts in pacman turn into floating eyeballs. This behavior only lasts for a limited time, however. It's about 24 seconds or so... I think.

Okay. That's the end of this week's devlog, so I hope you enjoyed reading. Make sure you tune in again next, next week as next week I'm on study break so there are no classes. I think the next project will be fun. Also, this week I will be uploading 2 projects for you to test. A project called Skeleton, a maze, turn based capture the flag game and also ratman. Enjoy!