Here’s the latest on Adam’s reboot of our turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit:
I added lots and lots of menus last month to flesh the game out: Credits (scrollable, so our original Kickstarter backers can find themselves), How to Play, Options, Spawn Menu, and Pause are all animated and working and nice.
This month: the Runner class is up and… running. And the Motivator should be done by the end of the day. Motivator took a bit longer because of all his damage buff weirdness, but at the rate I’m going it looks like all seven of our old minions could be in the game by the end of the month (but only the Solider will have his AI done).
I’m also trying to feel out a good time to get our old Kickstarter peoples a build. Something to play while we’re all quarantined.
3 responses to “March Update”
Great progress Adam. Keep it up! Even though you haven’t been getting comments, just know that there are people who are following your posts and excited to see the reboot!
By the way, how are you making the AI? I know before Alex was doing most of the coding so how are you going about the learning process? Random tutorials? An online course? I’m especially interested in the AI element as I am currently working on an AI for my own game.
Anyway, good luck!
I’m working in Unreal, so Alex said “learn everything you can about Behavior Trees”. Literally all I know is Unreal Behavior Trees.
I watched hours of Youtube demonstrations and tried things, and they were bad, and I Googled and read docs and forums and figured out how to make them better. This was a lot of my 2019, I was learning full time. I’m self-taught for a lot of things, but I don’t exactly know what my “method” is.
The Action RPG project was my testing grounds. Once I felt very familiar with the basics of how things worked (that’s important, so you know what to Google when something is broken), I started with simple bats that just chase you around, then worked my way up to support enemies that avoid you and look for needy enemies. I think I had like 5 enemy types by the end of the year, and was feeling confident that I could make something decent.
Then I threw all that out because it was just practice.
Thanks for the detailed response Adam. Seems like it’s not directly applicable to the type of game AI I’m implementing, but it’s still cool to hear how you’re going about it in Unreal! Self learning can definitely be great if you’re motivated (which it seems like you are given all the progress you’ve made!).
Personally, I like udemy since you can usually get courses for ~$10/15 with lifetime access (they play weird games with the pricing so you can try different browsers/private browsing to get different prices). Might be worth looking into if you want in-depth, structured content. Although, whatever you’re doing seems to be working out so perhaps it’s not necessary!
Anyway, looking forward to what’s next. Keep up the good work!