The goal of these progress logs is to mark out the biggest features that have been added, changed, or removed. It won’t cover everything that was done, but it will cover anything major. We also will have a dev log for those of you interested in the more technical side of how it was made.
Nothing is set in stone, and during game development a lot of features will be re-designed or completely scraped over time due to many reasons. These progress logs provide a snapshot into what the game looks like at the time of writing them, and hold no promise of what will make it into the final product.
The focus of this month for our development in Lamina Island has been our game’s AI.
Our AI has gone through a little bit of a revolution this month. Up until this point we had our own AI system running for our animals and heroes but we used a plugin called Emerald AI to handle our monster AI. In this month, we’ve noticed the limitations of using the third party AI system and have written our own combat AI.
Monsters and animals now run under the same AI system. This allows the animals to also go through combat phases when you attack them.
Instead of just running from combat.
They can now fight back.
Our spawn zones also needed some improvement. While the previous iterations of them would attempt to make sure to spawn and despawn creatures outside of the scope of the camera. It had a rather liberal view of what counted as a legal area to spawn things. It would spawn them either in the sky just out of the camera’s view, causing raining pigs, or it’d spawn them in a mountain, and there were even cases where it’d spawn the creatures under the ground.
The new spawn system is much more robust in the way it determines when and how it can spawn things.
Most of this month was dedicated to those two topics and the end result is pretty cool. Having AI that can both fight the player and spawn appropriately, gives the game it’s first real sense of agency. We also added loot to be dropped from killing the creatures, so there’s even more ways to collect alchemy ingredients for the mini game.
