Events, Goals, Artifice - What's Up Wednesday #13

Hey everybody,

Here's three things I made for Gig Master that I thought worked out pretty well:

Events

Gig Master is full of Mega Man references, and in order to make those references work, I needed little scenes where you give up control of your character.

So when you hit the big orange button at the center of the room or when you die or when you defeat Shoot Master (the blue underpants Mega Man guy) I spawn an Event Object.

While an Event Object exists, the player character ignores all controller inputs and Shoot Master does not receive AI inputs. This lets me control those characters through the Event Object, like making Gig Master walk into position on the right side of the screen and making Shoot Master enter through the boss door.

Each Event Object works its way through multiple phases, moving on from each phase once a condition is met. One phase might need Gig Master and Shoot Master at particular coordinates, another might need a timer to reach zero before moving on.

The final phase destroys the Event Object so normal inputs can resume.

I was surprised how much these little events made Gig Master feel like a "real" video game. I think I'm going to incorporate more of these into Bazooka Panic when I start working on it again. Maybe next month?

Goals

Each fight in Gig Master has certain objectives for you to achieve like winning, losing, hitting with a certain attack, or dodging a bullet.

When the objectives are set, I spawn an object for each one that waits to be triggered by something in the code, usually in the object collisions portion of the character code where things like damage from a bullet or axe are determined.

The system I used resembles how WIZARD LAWS checks to see if laws are being violated and how Beneath Faelin Wood checks for achievement triggers.

I can see using this trigger system to improve my tutorials and to acknowledge cool things that players pull off. I always like seeing that kind of feedback in games!

Hero AI

Shoot Master's AI is not terribly complex. At AI level 1 he'll pick a side of the level and stick to it. If Gig Master gets too close Shoot Master will run away to the side of the level Gig Master isn't on. Otherwise, if his energy is full, he'll pick a random number and shoot that many times toward Gig Master and jump if Gig Master is above him.

At level 2, Shoot Master's AI is basically the same but he gains the ability to dodge attacks. Whenever one of Gig Master's attacks is within a certain radius of Shoot Master, he'll dodge and set a timer to a random value. While this timer is counting down, Shoot Master can't dodge again.

It feels kind of cheap whenever Shoot Master dodges an attack and it would feel even worse if he was just automatically dodging everything so that timer keeps things feeling a little more fair.

AI level 3 gives Shoot Master a decreased dodge timer and one new behavior. If his energy is high, he'll move towards Gig Master instead of running away all the time. If he gets too close he'll run back to his safe corner.

Though it's an incredibly simple pattern, this aggressive behavior definitely gives the impression that Shoot Master is being piloted by a more confident player.

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Those are the big things I'm proud of in Gig Master! There are a million little things too including the explosion animations, the axe slam, the super simple dialogue system, the fish in the aquarium at the end- I could go on!

I'll leave it here though. Thanks for reading and Happy Wednesday!

KC

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