Guard mock-up among other things

This weeks blog post is the most difficult one to do so far and I couldn’t find any image to properly depict my work, so the picture below is the mock-up of how the guards will patrol the building and it also shows where the objective and exit. The reason behind this week being hard to post about is that alot of what I’ve done has been adding in new sprites and testing them out against our floor and the rest of the sprites.

The largest thing I‘ve done was when I added in the furniture for the ”Break room” or cafeteria and some of the furniture for the final area, the ”front desk” of the building. When we have a new build of our game I will probably have to change around some of the guard patrolling patterns, maybe remove some guards and perhaps even changing how parts of the level are built. The issue with building levels the way we do it is that when I’m building it, I have a really hard time figuring out how things will look in the actual game, since the color codes are purely representative and remain as colored squares until added in the game. This is also the reason why a lot of the work I’ve done is hard to put into pictures, since my work has essentially been: Add in new floor. Doesn’t work? Change it back. And it’s been a lot of these tests, with plenty of different values on furniture and so forth, to see if they would even be visible in the game.

Today (Thursday) has consisted largely of testing out variations of floors, we have had a lot of floors that plainly look strange, some that blur out when the player moves around and a few potentially useful ones. We tried a plain one, without any sort of patterns and that ended up looking… Plain. All the ones with smaller patterns were safe to scrap immediately since these always cause the illusion of the floor moving around.

Anyways, this weeks blog post ended up being more boring than ever before, I’m sorry for whoever might end up reading  this one… Hopefully next weeks blog post will be far more exciting since we will have a better AI and a fresher build of the game to play around with and when we do, I will get back to play testing and balancing the entire level (mainly the middle route though which is insanely hard by the looks of it).

Explaining the ”Noise maker”

This week I’ve been working on completing our design documents since we got a few comments on our first hand in.
The picture above is the image I made to briefly explain how one of our usable items will work. The Item I’m referring to is the ”Noise maker”. This item is meant to be a none-violent alternative to the rest of the players arsenal. It’s supposed to be a single use item which emits sound circles that will draw away guards from their original position/patrol path.

The sound circles are used in almost every step of the game, walking around creates smaller sound circles, sneaking removes them, using weapons (especially the gun) creates larger sound circles and the noise maker creates circles equal to the gun. These circles represent the sound made by everything in the game and helps show the player from what distance guards will hear the sound and go to investigate.

What the image above represents is:

The first image depicts the player seeing an enemy guarding the objective and throwing the noise maker to the opposite side of the room.
The second image shows an example of how large the sound circles emitted by the noise maker could be, and also shows the guard hearing the sound and starting to move towards the source of the sound.
Lastly, the third image shows the guard standing by the noise maker, investigating, while the player is able to sneak past towards the objective unnoticed.

Other than what I’ve explained above, I have also worked on other things for our design document, mainly a few minor corrections that needed to be made and further explanations of some specific things. I also made a quick drawing showing the movement patterns of our patrolling guards, as well as marking out the objective and exit. It had to be done since we previously had no visual explanation of how the level looks or what the guards potential moving patterns might be.

Just today (Thursday) I also had to continue working on our level, adding in new objects, trying out revised environmental sprites, now made to look darker, to better fit with our visual aesthetics. Previously the game was far to bright to be able to be taking place during night time.

All in all this week has consisted of a lot of smaller tasks put together, becoming time consuming. As soon as we get our AI’s to work properly I will probably have to rework the guards patrol patterns and positioning to make it more balanced again.

Rotating & vanishing Guards

 

Okay! This week has been a very interesting one! I have been further working on our level design and have been adding in rotations to our stationary guards. I also had to remake all of the patrolling patterns for our guards since there was some issues with how the guards spawned in comparison to where they wanted to patrol. I solved the patrolling guard issue quite easily, it was just a bit of tedious work on it to get it working properly. The rotation of the stationary guards was, for me, difficult in the beginning and ended up being a bit of a guessing game since I had no idea how to do it and the programmers had a hard time remembering how they did it. The main problem I had with it was this: I had to write the angle of which the guard starts rotating from and the angle where it turns and starts rotating back again. The guard in the picture for an example rotaded 270 degrees to 90 degrees. The thing I found to be most complicating about this was to make him rotate on the right side, to make this happen (if the guard didn’t rotate towards the hallway, but instead straight into the wall) was to simply flip the order of the angles in the document. I think I probably managed to make them rotate the wrong way every time and didn’t do it right from the start even a single time… But anyways, easily solved!
When fixing the patrolling guards we also encountered a minor issue where the guards couldn’t be spawned in the exact location that they where meant to be patrolling. Also a minor inconvenience that was easy to fix but still took some time to fix up properly.
Later in the week we started getting more features in and I had to start using the newer version of our game since this one was dated. We had added in more weapons, animations, the new sprites and so on. This is when the issues began. Patrolling guards began disappearing from the map, and we had no idea why. The vanishing of guards followed no specific patterns at all, it all happened completely at random. Later, started adding in sounds aswell, it all worked fine, until it suddenly just stopped working. Partially atleast. The gun stopped making sound for all of us except for one. All the issues we had, stopped happening on one of our computers. The owner of this computer uploaded his version of the game but it still isn’t working on the rest of our computers.
At the moment we have no way of fixing it, since we don’t know what the issue is. But that is for the programmers to find out!