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.

Week 10

We are going for alpha this week, and while talking to other teams they feel super duper nervous about going for it this week. Our team on the other hand just feels super nervous, but at the same time we feel like we are in a good position overall on our goals. Although we made a lot of our original goals, we realized we wanted more once we got closer. So this stuff added to our alpha goal about last second, but were a lot more important than other goals. For example AI vs AI was something we didn't want at all and then we realized we really did need it not only want but need it in the game. This took a week out of updating to get it working and make sure everything worked appropriately and behaved correctly. So I personally feel very confident in our project in terms of alpha and feel we actually accomplished more than originally planned. So when people are nervous about our presentation I try to tell them not to be.

Week 8 and 9

This week started with a bang, we have been debating AI vs AI for a while, whether we wanted it or not. The AI was set up to deal with and work on either side, besides for some specific launch actions. So we finally figured out for kiosk mode that it would be nice to just have two AI players go off. This will show off our game, and in a way we think players could be playing. As well its sort of a mirror early game which is a defined goal. However once action starts happening you can see where the goal orientation really comes into effect. They nuke different targets and locations, and they start to build upgrade and launch their specific upgrades as well. This makes me happy that the goal orientation really takes into effect, as I wanted it. A similar early game always, but the reaction to the other players nukes and moves works.

As well we are working more towards this play style, because it has showed us a few bugs that we haven't noticed when the player faces the AI, just some little unwanted effects nothing that was very game breaking. Still this week is finish the AI completely and putting in the final upgrade type which is a charge effect. Going to take it out the way its done now and make the faction upgrade pieces their own class with methods for casting. This way if one is a charge it will know when to use it and I won't need to create unnecessary checks. This will drastically increase performance, as well as extension later on. If we want to create a new type just add a class and the upgrade type will know what to do when casting.

Overall we are moving into a great spot, and we have overcame a couple bumps in the road from earlier which is really good for the teams morale. As well GDC and Pax East were the past couple weeks, which we took our game to. Whats good is we got a lot of amazing feedback as well as people really enjoyed the game. That was also a huge boost in morale, and exciting for our team. It really helped push towards a release at the end of the year and maybe continue it in spare time while we start our careers in this coming May.

Week 7 Accidents and Bug Fixes

We have been working full throttle in order to get everything in ASAP, this has caused some unannounced, bugs as well as forgotten communication, which isn't good nor bad. We have come together today and spent a large deal of time going over everything that has been modified updated and than some foreseen, bugs. Both for myself with the AI and the other Alex, with overall game-states. First there has been some clamping on the angle modification for node by node, for all projectiles and each is different. For the Nuke, it causes very specific situations where it nukes itself. Although it is very hard to predict when or how often it is a "feature" that needs to be fixed and removed. I have played the game in speed mode about 50 times, and it has only happened approx 3-5 out of about 200 nukes. However one of those ended the game because it blew up it's own shield followed by a command center hit in the following turn from one of my nukes.

This also causes problems with the faction based upgrades to which I was not expecting or had the time to fix after everything else today. Their caps are extremely small which means instead of being able to be launched from any situation I will need to figure out a degree that can be launched and than based on what can be launched a degree of targets for each location. Therefore centers towards the other planet will be the best location to launch from and moving up and down reduces the amount of space's I could actually hit.

As well the upgrade for the radiation tower of the Ruskies faction is in. This is the current faction the AI has originally been designed for and swapping out for specific faction upgrades will be consolidate to new classes with specific functions. The radiation tower upgrade is a projectile you launch, but hope misses the enemy planet and shields, but you follow up with a nuke that hits it and causes a large explosion. So next week getting that to work is my overall goal followed by timed events, that have a charge. Since these are both similar turns later they will be best to be done in a generic way that the set-up is the same and by ending different upgrades in the future will be easy. For example just to add the Radiation drill to launch, was extremely easy. I just added the specific faction upgrade and the upgrade building function took care of the rest for me even when I wanted to launch it generically it took care of it. Where it launches the specific event I will need the check, so that it doesn't do a generic launch event. I have it set to a launch for generic's before they are added just for ease and most of the special upgrades are just launching events that can and will be used by both sides no matter who launched them so it is up to the prediction to figure it out.

Overall we have also come to a UI finalization after one more go at getting feedback. However testers are thoroughly confusing on their responses. They had a ton of complaints about one and said it would never work for x, y, z and more. Yet when asked which their favorite was they chose it. So it won't work and we can't use it, yet we want it in the game. From people who are looking forward to playing the game it seems weird to want something they know and can predict will not be useful at all.

As well this week has been dedicated to AI bugs and updates. I have gone through and found a lot of mistakes, by just watching the AI play those 50 or so games. None of them were actually game breaking, and were never noticed by testers in any of the last 15 or so testing sessions. This means personally, it was pretty efficient I feel but it could and is better. There were random times for example where it wouldn't fully use the resources, they were extremely weird and situational. The same side it would refuse to build buildings if certain chain effects happen. Although their wasn't any logical errors almost different checks. However if you blew up the buildings it caused no problems at all and rebuilt appropriately. The bug was actually if it built in a very specific order it would leave two building slots wide open. This was because it was accidentally being saved as full slots that read as a full empty slot. The check for all of the adding wasn't being caught and switching a couple orders fixed this bug. As well the upgrade bug was figuring that it could upgrade and wanted to, yet it chose not to which was a bit fishy, but of a similar problem. When it was upgrading one, it would sometimes believe that by doing one it did them all and said everything had an upgrade. Although it was also very situational and in 10 games played it could happen at random times or never at all. Sometimes you got all buildings upgraded and sometimes just the first one it chose to do. Even though each building type, and building itself was being checked by itself it had some weird problems with lists and set them all to true accidentally even when the check for if the building type. Happily though all of these were fixed today atleast in my testing. I will be having people running QA for our team watching for weird situations in the building and upgrades because since this all seems to be weird situations, even though I wrote it with what I thought no specific situations in mind and tried to keep it as abstract as Alex and I thought would be cohesive compared to coupling, it still needed certain weird situations where it broke just to fix itself. Remove the full empty slots, and the upgraded non-upgraded spots.

Week 6 - Trick Shots

This week I went back into the Nuke launch system as well as spruce up the goal orientation. Originally with the original Path-builder it was safe to create nukes from a specific area of the planet. This week I went back at made it possible to nuke from any location and it will avoid shooting  itself and is ready. However due to the ability to only move the first three node and the remainder go in that direction there are some slots it can never hit. So in future weeks I will need to go back and have some checks based off of the angle the missile would need to go at launch time. So technically if the angle from initial launch to the desired location would be about Pi / 4 or 45 degrees it wouldn't be able to make it if its to the right side of the planet. However that's an estimate, of course I would write something to figure that out at run time if the nodes would change and it can figure out where it can hit. Also I added in the faction upgrades this week and set the goal for being able to use those actives. Specifically to get it tested I put in the Ruskie chrome upgrade. For two reasons, one it just takes one turn to use its upgrade, and second its the only one in the game atm, the others are being programmed and implemented this upcoming week or two.

It works very nice except for the fact it cost nothing. Therefore as long one chromium drill is upgrade to that, it will cast on that turn. This has two effects. One it can always cast this event. Since currently we want the AI to use up all resources and possible events so it ends with as close to no resources as possible. Eventually before it ends it turn, since the goal it will only be able to shoot straight. I will have a modifier that checks if it is in a spot that will even hit the enemy planet. This will decrease the automatic uses, however it will also make sure something get hits. Currently it will go through the enemy planet, since its a drill it makes sense.

So for this week a neat thing the AI can figure out is a shot that goes up over a couple buildings than comes back. On a plus once it hit the command center perfectly which it would have missed if it went straight for it because it would have collided with another building first. However most of the time, it still does it sometimes even when there are no buildings and because it has a slight offset, it has also come turned around and gone all the way to its on planet and blown up its own command center. So for this shot that it can select its 1 win and 1 loss for its own nuke. Of course for this to work, it has to select the target and launch from a very specific rotation where it figures out the amount of turns is the right amount. Although it is still very neat it figured this out without any specific type of ray casting at the moment. Since we have no rigid bodies or anything unity related tied to the objects they are not on the ray casting layer. In the upcoming weeks, I will need to find a way to raycast and only set its planet on it. Since nukes only blow up enemy buildings or either planet. Players can shoot nukes through their buildings. However this will also take some ray casting which I will create this week. It will allow for better shots in less turns. Thus being more accurate as well as taking one or more turns less in order to get to a location.