Week 14

Next week is the big week and our team is feeling confident with Senior Show. This past week our game played at a local Arcade & Bar and it went super well. This helped our teams morale tremendously. We weren't in a bad spot, we were feeling well and confident, but a nice boost is great. It allows us to be even more confident moving forward even better. As a team we are trying to implement all the updated assets and avoid feature creep as much as possible. The build currently is due in 48 hours and at least the last 24 we want to have to be bug fix and testing. The last thing we want is to add something with less than 24 hours and have something go wrong. That never ends well for a team. The least stress near the end the better people will feel going into Senior Show, which allows for less stress afterwards when they need to talk to the recruiters and have interviews. A strong show will allow great morale for all things to follow the show which will help everyone out tremendously.

Week 13

This week and for the remainder until the senior show I as the AI Engineer am going through and waiting for bugs and problematic events that the AI creates. So one of the updates was a couple more modifier values that allowed the difficulty value to be more heavily controlled other than just choice modifiers. Some of these are maximum amount of actions per turn. This will allow the AI to be create their base as well as bombard the player less than normal. With three nuke silos, instead of one nuke each every two or three turns. Now you can limit that to as low as zero for some tutorial levels. This way you can almost control the max amount of damage an AI can inflict per turn. Although now this means the AI will nuke most likely if modifiers are slightly tweaked for it to follow through with a nuke two spots behind. This can impact similarly with a one to follow up. So just by reducing this it has other features that could be avoided. Also, added a modifier on the randomness of an angle the AI will choose.

The angle on the AI has some problematic occurrences when it is it has any. Since it calculates a perfect angle and than we add this similar to noise. We were trying to keep as many hand holding as possible for the AI, however with this noise there is a chance that it will land on the planet. Since increases the max noise angle, if the noise hits that max. If it happens from the backside of the planet, the angles are so close anything over 9 degrees it looks like seems to cause it to hit its planet. However it looks as if it was just going for a trick shot some of the time and barely hit. This is similar to how a players have acted so, it seems to happen on both sides as they get more used to the limitations of the explosions. Early players stay far from even going through their buildings which explosions do not occur on. As they learn that, they test their limitations and will sometimes blow up their nuke on their planet which does happen. This way they can get the quickest and most controlled shot to where they want. As we go through this with the AI a larger noise early and slim it down, it will blow itself up early, and it will tend to happen less and less.

If this causes problems and they don't want it to happen at all, we are just going to happen to through cases in where the noise can only be positive in certain locations and negatives in other. So the top of the right planet and the bottom of the left can be only negative noise. This will take it away from the planet. As the opposite the bottom of the right and top of the left can be positive noise. We can implement this if it occurs to be problematic before senior show. We are trying to test it to see how often it happens, and what specifically are the largest negatives it causes. It's not a change we are hoping for because it is hard set parameter and if the game largely changes this is something that will not be modular and would have to be re-created or taken out if large changes happen.

Week 11 & 12

These past two weeks our team has been running full steam on getting ready for Beta tomorrow. As a team we are a bit nervous, but who wouldn't be our final year is coming to a close. Getting ready for these presentations that can help get those who are still looking get jobs. A new world is upon everyone some are ready some fear they are not, yet you have to take the step no matter what. So with all that we have for the AI been working on getting a better difficulty scale in. When I created the AI, I didn't for see the problems people have had facing it. I knew its targeting would be good, yet I didn't allow it to boost its own building in an effort to reduce its power turn to turn. I also, currently have the faction upgrades just shooting straight at the enemy and missing from time to time. As well it doesn't use perfect angles in order to go through and tries to avoid its own buildings which a nuke can go through. However even after all of these, testers have been saying that the difficulty average is 3-4 out of 5. We were hoping for our first release for the AI that it would be underwhelming and with additions after graduation would eventually have people able to choose. So we have added a couple tweaking methods back in. Originally I had a modifier in their the designers could use. With all the progression and rushes to get others in I briefly removed the feature, when we thought everything was quite balances. I also had a max actions per turn the AI could use. This was meant to be used in the early levels as we try to walk the player through getting progressively stronger. We took them out when we thought everything was good, however with some updates we have had to revert them back into the game in order to allow players to feel more comfortable and than start to walk them towards stronger AI. As we finalize the launching and actions, we will have to use these more and more in the earlier level. As a team we feel very confidante and believe we can also have a strong release after graduation.