[Devlog]Chaotic month and Chaotic AIs!

Hey friends

Today I wanna write a bit about what work we have been doing in Solas City Heroes this month, as well as some stuff coming in the future.

This last month was very chaotic. I moved to a different province, which is a lot harder than just moving from just inside the city, and had to get all the services and stuff done, and other non-gamedev related stuff that consumed a lot more time than I expected. This together with me learning to work with a programmer caused some very interesting work schedules.

Most of you may not be familiar with how working in gamedev is, or how is working with other people, basically I’m used to have access to everything in the project -all the scripts-, but in order to prevent mismatches and stuff like that when you work with more people you have to avoid touching some files, so you don’t overwrite your partner’s work (or he overwrite yours).

This is easy if you and the other people work on different things, but when the game has one big main script and the stuff that both have to do is with the same script, it becomes very…complicated. So I definitely learned something about future project organization!

But what was the focus during last month?

During last month the focus was to complete the player character controller. During the 0.6 updates we changed a bunch of things, some major, some minor, but all together make for a huge difference. Most of the things were related to how the game reads the inputs and then processes them. When I started Solas City Heroes I used an asset for a basic beat em up gameplay, which over the months we were replacing with our own stuff. Similar to the ship of Theseus but instead of replacing all parts for the same ones, we replaced them for improved versions, and then added some lasers and naked people. So if you open the 0.1 versions you can see that the general idea looks similar, but once you start playing with it you will feel the huge difference in smoothness, sliding and stopping. (Also a lot of features were added like dashing, charged punches, etc)

Another thing that took us a lot of time was the controller setup. Although this was added a bit before, there were some functions that weren’t properly made in the original asset for handling gamepads, so we (actually he did, I only hard tested it) had to make a bunch of changes in the code to allow controllers to work, and even still we can’t get the game to work 100% with controllers.

We plan to have a second pass at controllers around november. The big focus that we have been working during this month and the last half of the previous month was remaking enemy AI. Which, this is the third attempt, with me failing completely on the first one, doing a decent job on the second one to provide a basic AI that won’t bug out and ignore the player, and now with a [real] programmer that is completely remaking it from scratch so we don’t have to deal with limitations from the starting asset.

The new AI isn’t finished yet, we still have a lot of testing and changes to do, but now it takes more factors into account that only if it can see or not the player. We are also adding the possibility for different types of attacks (including enemies having a firearm or throwing grenades), and even retreating for a bit.

I have to admit that I massively miscalculated how much time and effort this would take. I just thought that AI was hard for me because I suck at it, but turns out, even for professional programmers with university degrees it takes a lot of time to get to work perfectly. AIs seems to be one of the hardest areas of programming as it is extremely prone to generate bugs or erratic/random behavior if even the tiniest detail isn’t taken into account.

But things are advancing at a steady rate, slower than I anticipated, but still advancing, so next month we will see the first iterations of the new AI.

Now for the most interesting part of this: The new AI not only will make the combat more interesting, but will be able to pick up a defeated player and put it into a close heavy bondage furniture, or even join in during a sex interaction to turn it into a threesome!

I can’t promise that both features will be ready for next month, but will be ready before the end of the year, and the IA will be able to make better real time decisions rather than just charging the hero at all times!

And on a different note, to show something more visual that I've been working on. This was a suggestions by a challenger tier patron which I really liked and turned into this:

Previously there were no hairstyles that would look more on the general look of when people wore full head masks with a ponytail, so I made some!

I made these 4 ponytail styles where you can use them as your haircut and play a hero that has a monk-ish haircut. Or you can use it as a part of some very cool looks with some head items.

But also! I was going to add a bondage mask anyway, so I pushed it earlier to get it out for next month’s update, and I have to say, it looks great when combined with the new hairstyle!

(Colored bondage is one of my favorite features I ever added!)

(That's how a full set looks, the punishment hood counts as a blindfold)

That’s most of the recent news of what happened during August and September. I will come back with more news. 

And I wanna thank all of you who support the project and make this possible!

But also to all who voted in the last poll, I now have a better understanding of what animations you are interested in seeing and this is very useful to decide and schedule what animations to do in the future (and when).

Have a great weekend friends!

And I'll talk to you next week with the objectives for October!

Cheers