Internal Milestone 004 – More puzzles, AI and Gameplay

This month’s milestone pretty much just focused on expanding the gameplay experiences that we setup in previous milestones. We implemented a few new puzzles, a new camera mode, along with some new AI and gameplay features.

Puzzles

Not too  many details to go into for this section, but we implemented four new grey box levels and they turned out surprisingly well. We spent time improving our streaming tech, that we talked about in the previous milestone post, and integrated seven of our levels into it so that we could start to get a feel for how the game feels when everything is tied together. Below if an image of all the grey boxed levels loaded at once. Not much to look at yet!

Gameplay Features (X-Com style camera, keycards and doors)

I’ll just let this video do the talking for me on this one.

Dog AI

We are playing around with having dogs in the game and to start off with we just gave them some of the basic movement and vision AI that we have for some of the other AI characters in the game. We took it a step further and decided to give them the ability to smell the player and to hear the player. We plan to integrate the hearing into most if not all of the other AI in the game, but the smelling should be unique to the dogs. The player will then be able to counter this by masking their smell in various ways. Nothing too fancy, but should provide a nice variety to gameplay.

I can’t think of any other games that do this at this time, so hopefully that means that it’s something unique and not something that is boring or frustrating!

I’m really excited for next milestone because we are going to start trying to nail down the art style. We’ve selected a small area to polish up with some nice environment art and lighting to see how it feels and if it’s going to work, without going too overboard. We’ll also be focusing on improving the AI again by polishing up features, adding a few more AI types and fixing up bugs.