Dodgeball Mania 2

 

Update 1

Before any AI can start to be developed into the game, the player model and animations have to be found and implemented correctly. All of the animations and models so far have been from Mixamo.com with some of the animations that I am using being combined to have the upper body and lower body play different animations.

One of the main focuses of this project is to improve some of the methods that I have used in the past projects when trying to communicate between different actors. The first improvement that I'm making is using less casting nodes when trying get information from one blueprint to another as I understand it is more resource intensive. Instead, I am using blueprint interfaces which allow for a much easier time when it comes to sharing information around.

The main mechanic of picking up and throwing the ball has been improved since the first version Dodgeball Mania by having the player being able to overlap with the ball to pick it up as this results in a smoother gameplay experience for the player. The throwing of the ball has also been improved by having the ball being able to spawn in the players hand at the right time in the throwing animation to make it appear that the player model is actually throwing the ball. The checks that are carried out when the ball has overlapped a player or hit a player have also been reduced, resulting in a more efficient code.

To go along with using blueprint interfaces, I have created a parent class with all the necessary actions that the player and AI will carry out during a game such as throwing the ball, dodging to the left and right and sprinting. So far this allowed for a much more efficient code to be made as the AI and player share the same abilities and therefore only require programming them once. Using a parent class for this game also brings the possibility of having each AI having different appearances in the game as they are able to share the same class.

On the initial implementation of the AI, the standard requirements to make AI have been added which are the mesh bounds, AI controller, blackboard and behaviour tree. The current abilities that the AI is able to carry out are: