WBL - DAY 1

Work Based Learning - 15/01/2019 (7 hours)

We were given our brief today and were told to create a game. Our team started to brain storm ideas and we came up with a brute princess that is the saviour for her knight and needs to collect all the pieces of the sword that's scattered around the courtyard and the castle in order to defeat the dragon, we decided to have it this way because we thought it would be more interesting and different than the knight saving the princess like in many others games like Mario the main goal is to rescue peach. We came up with the idea of it being a 3D plat former game and it be cartoon style. We wanted to have enemies and hazards such as goblins, skeletons and wolves.

After talking to Craig about our idea he suggested we make it more simple rather than a complex game because of the time we have to do it and he suggested a tower defence game which we all agreed to do. We looked into tower defence games and I looked into finding a decent tutorial because I'm the level programmer for this project, so that I could follow because I've never created a tower defence game before so I needed someone to help me through it.For our new game idea we decided to take Craig's advice and changed our idea into a tower defence, we decided to keep the princess and the knight but change the enemy to skeletons that will attack the castle.



First I started with creating AI with an end location and this means that the enemy will walk along the path until he reaches the end location. I used a blackboard and a behaviour tree to create the AI which was interesting as I've never used it before and I learned some new things in unreal that I can use.

Here is the spawn AI blueprint this allows the AI to spawn whenever the actor is placed in the world. This is an important aspect to the game because without a spawner the AI would just be thee in the level and we needed them to spawn so that in the future I can setup waves.

Setting an end location inside the behaviour tree. I set up this for the AI to follow the path set up with the nav mesh and go to the end location as a finish line otherwise they would just stand still. 

I ran into an issue with the AI, the enemy wouldn't move from the spawn point to the end location so I went back over the bit in the tutorial that I just did and I couldn't see any difference so I asked my team if they knew if anything was wrong with it and Ashley pointed out that the nav mesh didn't look like it was on the map so I moved it down slightly and that fixed the issue. Next time I will make sure that the nav mesh is touching the map.