Update #44:It's been a while since my last post, so I have a lot to update here. After getting greenlit on Steam, and a successful Kickstarter campaign, I put my head down and got to work. It seems to have paid off. Trial by Viking recently became one of 20 winners of the 2015 Taco Bell Indie Game Garage contest, and has been nominated for Best Desktop/Downloadable in the 2016 Games Connection Development Awards taking place in two weeks! I will be at Games Connection demoing the game in the Awards Pavilion if anyone wants to stop by and say hello. There is a shuttle there from GDC.
I have recently completed a demo that I'm pretty proud of as well! You can try out a copy for Windows or Mac right now by
clicking here.
So the game is releasing on Steam in less than a month. March 29th, just after Easter. I'm pretty nervous. I haven't gotten a lot of coverage on games sites, but that's to be mostly expected as an unknown indie dev I suppose. Hopefully things go well
Here's a new gif for you all! Troll boss. Don't worry there are 27 bosses, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling too much.
I also wanted to talk a little bit about AI. I was recently having trouble with my simpleton flyer AI getting snagged on walls. I had talked previously about how I use the last *seen* position of the player as a target for this particular AI, but I never implemented any path finding. This AI isn't supposed to be *that* smart. What I've done however seems to work really well, so I will try to explain it a bit here.
So this flyer AI flies toward a target. It's pretty simple in that respect. When it hit a wall however, it got snagged and stopped or slowed down a lot (and also looked silly doing it). So I started using a little linecasting to help. I cast a line from the AI towards the target at a distance of about one unit. If I get a hit against a platform, I figure out what the reflection vector is. From the target vector and the reflection vector, I can find the halfway vector between the two, which should be a vector that is parallel to the surface that my linecast hit. Using this as the new direction instead of just trying to keep going towards the target, means the AI will slide along the wall at full speed instead. This usually means it will end up finding it's target again, and head towards it once there is no wall in between. It's not perfect, but as I said, this is one of the first AIs you encounter, and it's not supposed to be *too* smart. Here's a small scribble to illustrate what I am talking about.
Anyways, thanks for listening. Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments.
Cheers,
Dustin
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