William DeMayo

3/8/24

Part 1: The Problem(s)

I encountered three major problems this week two of which I have solved and one that I am still struggling with. For an overview, the mini-boss that I am creating has two attack patterns one that shoots a ranged homing projectile and the other being a heavy-hitting melee damage. The three problems that I have encountered stemmed from projectiles, the ranged behavior tree, and the inherited variables not working properly. The projectile was having a problem due to me trying to figure out how to set up the homing system for it. The behavior trees are causing problems while attacking with both the ranged and the already working base attack. The last major problem was with the inherited values from the base zombie used in the mini-boss.

All three of these problems stem into one big problem a buggy mini boss. That’s the worst thing when you are playing a game and there is a buggy opponent. These three problems have a variety in range but all cause one major problem with the AI. The player needs to feel challenged by this type of enemy, I want them to be startled when the mini-boss spawns on the map. The best mini-boss’ always startles the player the first time or until they learn the attack patterns. Let me explain how I solved some of these problems and how I am planning to solve the others.

Part 2: The Solution(s)

                The first major problem that I faced this week was setting up a homing movement for it. I aimed to design a slow moving high damage aoe projectile. There were three main functions that I had to make for the projectile to understand its homing capabilities: get all the current players and compare the distances between them; move the projectile to the closest player; Lastly, the other function that needed to be done was to damage the player. The further I looked into unreal after an immense struggle of trying to move the target fluently, I researched more online. The thing that I found ties directly to the projectile component is that there is built-in functionality for homing movement. There are two settings one that’s a boolean value for is a homing projectile and the other being a float for homing acceleration magnitude. I learned how to set the homing target of the projectile and it made it a unique low gravity, bouncy, high damaging homing projectile.

                The second and third major problem solutions tie in with one another. First, the problem of not being able to attack will cause a problem for the inherited animations and sound because if the attack is never getting called neither is the animation. I need to sort through the behavior tree tasks to see if I made one tiny error that could have caused the attack not to work. Another problem that I thought may have been the issue was it looked as if the mini-boss was not interacting with the interface that we built for enemy attacking. I notice this in the debug interface while running the game in runtime. With a base zombie, it increments the amount of the melee animation each time it attacks, however, the mini-boss does not even select a task at all it bounces around to every single task at the same time. This problem could either be due to the inheritance of the interface not working, or the attack functions not working correctly because of the behavior tree tasks. Both would have their own reasons for screwing up inherited variables and the way the mini-boss interacts. I am planning to debug my mini-boss problem even further and find the root cause. The next thing that I am going to revise to see if it fixes the problem is the mini boss’ AI controller.

Picture of the Miniboss Zombie AI Controller: