Level Design is Exhausting lol
Added 2022-07-18 02:57:55 +0000 UTCSorry for being gone for so long! The project has not been on pause at all, but trying to get everything done for a failed release date was pretty draining. I'm going to try and balance that a bit better in the coming months so bear with me.
Map progress has been going well, but unfortunately not fast enough hence our unfortunate delay. One big focus has been getting a proper tutorial for the game. We're pretty close to satisfied with it so here's a showcase of some bits, still pretty WIP but looking solid:
AI has largely been the same for most of the year, with just little bug fixes and adjustments to get what I want, but I have recently added a new feature to help with precombat, which Half-Life 2 has historically lacked.
Patrols work with an ai goal behavior, meaning they can be enabled or disabled in hammer by a level designer whenever they wish. When active, npcs look for patrol points that apply to them. Patrol points can have a priority value for determining which should be visited first and a refresh time to dictate when they're valid to search again. This has made stuff like having soldiers sweep a room looking for you a lot easier, no longer needing a bunch of nonsense scripted logic just to get them into a room.
Little preview here:
As a final note, I've also started expanding the AI's understanding of where you might be by having them store your position if they hear you attack or move. In the past they operated solely around where they last saw you and while they could investigate sounds, it did not give them the full context of who was making the sound, so their usual combat behavior wasn't really altered.
I'm keeping this post a bit short but I'll be expanding on what development has been like and what I'm having to learn in the next post. It'll be less of a behind the scenes thing and more of a general game development article so I might be making that public after a certain period of time. Thanks for following and look forward to a (hopefully) more consistent stream of content in the future.
