A mind is a terrible thing…

This week my sole purpose was to create the epic, climatic, amazing, exhilarating… boss battle. I knew that if anything in the game was going to leave a good impression that it needed to be the final boss. If Dark Souls has taught me anything, it’s the thrill of winning an awesome boss fight.

I had worked a little bit with behavior trees in Unreal Engine but mostly AI behavior I’ve worked on previously has been low level C++ code. So using a GUI to implement some of this was really interesting. It seems like it took a lot of work setting up variables to trigger various events. At one point one thing that was odd was that the boss was taking no damage at all. He would just sit there, not move, not take damage or do anything.

I worked tirelessly on the behavior tree. As you can see for one enemy it became quite expansive. I know that AAA games have AI behavior trees much more intricate and accurate than this but for someone with no experience I’m mostly happy with how everything turned out. It was interesting having my wife playtest the boss battle. When she employed a very simple “stand right here and shoot” strategy that ultimately killed the boss in only a minute. I knew then there was more tweaking to be done. One thing I didnt consider is how others would approach the boss. When I was testing things I was running around making the camera do cinematic things to look cool… really get into the action. But some players may not approach the situation like that so I needed to get rid of the “this looks cool” as my top priority and go back to function over style.

Ultimately I need play test data. I’m hoping that in the coming weeks the closed beta testers will give my game a chance and leave some feedback. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fun aspects of game development. Designing the boss AI for this game really was a blast. I can’t wait to get back in there and tweak it some more!