PPBB Devblog #3 - First enemy & AI

Enemies are a huge chunk of the game, that's why we started thinking about them really early.

Our main concern wasn't the AI decision process but the movements & behaviour in the arenas.

We have a lot of different enemy types in mind but we are focusing on basic behaviors right now.

The first enemy type is a 'charge' enemy that will just jump on you when he is close to you to damage & push you back.

One of the first things we did was to create some basic navigation mesh (a cartography of where the enemy can walk to).

The engine Godot allow us to generate this navigation mesh pretty easily (it will be generated according to the level geometry).

Still with the help of Godot, it's rather easy to generate a path for the enemy to follow to get to another point in the level while avoiding obstacles.

The main issue here is how to make the enemy follow the player when the player jumps on another platform.

In order to do this, we made a tool to create points that will make the AI jump from one platform to another smoothly and another tool to visualize it in the editor.

With theses tools, we just have to setup the landing and jumping points and the enemy can now follow the player everywhere he goes !

And that's a wrap for this type of enemy.

Of course, it's still rather basic but it will be polished along the game.

This concludes today's devblog, we hoped you found this post interesting, see you next week with something else (I'm still thinking about it so it will be a surprise).