ANDREW SIPES
GAME DEVELOPER
Invasion is a thrilling first-person shooter that immerses you in the chaos of a Mars facility overrun by aliens. Battle through relentless hordes, uncover the source of the corruption, and confront the ultimate boss to save the planet from imminent destruction.
Platform: PC
Playtime: 15 mins
Engine: Unity
Roles: General Programmer, User Interface, Artificial Intelligence
MY ROLE
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Developed the initial game concept and pitch.
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Facilitated daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning, and milestone completion.
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Managed and updated project workflows in Trello.
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Designed and programmed Boss Artificial Intelligence.
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Crafted and developed User Interface
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Developed solutions for complex challenges through effective team collaboration.
DEVELOPING BOSS AI
We featured 2 bosses in Invasion, Gorosaurus and the Demon Lord. Each enemy features a ranged attack and a melee attack dependent on the player range. My goal for these Bosses was to provide a challenge to players and require them to quickly react to their attack styles.
In the beginning stages of development, I added disks and colliders to Gorosaurus to get an understanding of how boss' animations visually would affect the player. Over time, I adjusted these disks to fine tune the boss's mechanics. The size of the colliders played an integral part in how the player would visually interpret attacks and also determine their range when fighting this boss.
The end result was two large capsules starting from his hands. I wanted the player to have the impression they were getting mauled by this boss if they remained too close.
I took a different approach with the demon lord. This Boss used a whip and a sword, and in order to get the collision working as expected, I implemented a collider system that would turn on during attack and turn off after the attack. Since a whip isn't an easy shape like a sword or hands, I had to use several sphere colliders to accomplish this.
In addition to melee and ranged attacks, the boss also included a routine mechanic where he would fly into the air and summon several enemies that the player would need to fight. This required advanced knowledge of Unity Engine Physics and Nav Mesh. To accomplish this, I came up with a simple AI pattern using if statements in the update method.
This is was the algorithm I ended up deploying:
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I used If statements to determine which phase the boss was in, this was based on health.
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In each if statement, if the player hit one of the 30% markers, I would have the boss drop health orbs and flip a bool that would determine if a summon was performed or not, and another bool that would start a summoning coroutine.
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If the summon coroutine was triggered, then the boss would fly to a location to perform the summon.
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Once the boss reached the summoning location, we'd face the player and begin running the Summon Event.
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After a specified amount of time, the boss would fly down and follow a specific attack pattern based on which stage they were in.
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This loop would repeat, with the boss performing a summon event each time the player reduced his health by 30%.