A New Semester, New Features!

Hello again! It’s the start of a new semester, which means it’s time for a new wave of development on Grab It and Go! We’ve taken the Winter Break to mull over various issues we had at the end of the project in the fall, and it seems we’re in a position to really come at the project swinging. Of course, for me, this means a new changelog filled with lots of new additions, including a huge swath of NPC AI movement bugfixes!

But first, I’ll be filling you in on our planned content additions:

Firstly, we plan to expand and polish our mall level with the addition of two new areas: a restaurant and furniture store. We’ll also be refining the graphics and cutting down on lots of unnecessary polys, using the knowledge we gained toward the end of last semester.

Secondly, we’re planning on adding an entirely new level: The Park! This outdoor area will feature a valley park surrounded on all sides by mountains and cliffsides, and will provide a whole new host of challenges, complete with fewer hiding spots and more open space for you to be seen in by the Conspiracy Theorists.

We’ll also be adding a level hub that will allow you to access both existing and planned levels whenever you like, and even give you the option of disabling the tutorial after the first playthrough of the Mall level. Sure, it’s helpful during the first round, but even I start to get annoyed with it after a hundred playtests of the Mall level. It needs a switch so that it can be turned off at the user’s leisure!

To top it off, we plan on adding a new enemy - the Theorist Boss! A fellow who will resort to calling on his underlings to chase you, rather than do the dirty work himself! Don’t let him see you, or you’ll have to contend with lots of Conspiracy Theorists coming at you all at once!

More details to come, but for now, here’s the first (and immense) list of changes, which covers everything since the start of January:

+Replaced the old floor of the mall with a newer, textured version to reduce poly count.

+Rebaked the Mall’s lightmap with these new optimizations. This reduced the lightmap file size by at least 65%, which will hopefully reduce loading times and game size significantly!

+Reinstated the Player prefab with the latest modifications.

+Made a new Park Scene, and scaled out the terrain to what should (I hope) be a suitable size for the new level.

+Began making the paths for the park with placeholder textures.

+Added some small hills and valleys to part of the park

+Made the south-eastern side of the park lower than the western side, and made a few valleys.

+Added cliffs and mountains to the park area - the park is shaping up to be a valley amidst a mountainous region.

-Discovered that the player can phase through shelves and walls if they go fast enough. This is being investigated.

+Made a new player-specific collider for the toy store shelves to make them thicker for collision checks. This was done in order to reduce the possibility of the player clipping straight through the shelves in rare circumstances.

+Set up a plot for the new restaurant in the Mall level, and created an appropriate grouping.

+Increased base NPC trip stun time to 6 seconds, up from 5.

+Fixed a minor inconsistency with tripping knockout recovery - the enemy was gaining more health upon recovery than they should.

+Removed some debug conditions for certain alerts, as they should always execute if their conditions are met.

+Added new documentation to the Conspiracy Theorist enemy.

+Fixed a major bug where a Conspiracy Theorist could restore its movement after being tripped if it was currently in the middle of attempting to attack the player.

+In the process, found another bug where Conspiracy Theorist attacking behavior was not resetting after a failed attack (for various reasons). This has also been fixed.

+Added a warning to account for possible default NPC behavior being set to inappropriate behaviors.

+Fixed an AI movement bug that caused Conspiracy Theorists that had previously been chasing an already-caught player to stagger towards the respawned player’s location slowly and endlessly, while also still being considered a “wandering” NPC.

+Updated the park with a newly added grass texture.

+Made a prefab of the new restaurant booth seat.

+Put the player object back on the Player layer. It was reverted to the Default layer for some reason…

+Began work on a new Player prefab, with the center point focused on the ground where the player is located.

+Added a new Conspiracy Theorist to the Mall scene with all necessary animations. It’s currently positioned near the player in the toy store.

Well, that’s it for now, and this was a major amount of changes. I can say with confidence that I’ve managed to really polish off NPC movement AI behavior, and it’s shaping up to be a very good self-contained system… with potential for additions at a later date.

More to come!