Enemy Interactions and Types (Team 11)

[charvei]

Description

With the basic outline of enemies and the concept of the game becoming more defined, this issue is concerned with refining existing enemies and creating new enemies to represent a cunning force that meaningfully interacts with the battlescape. We aim to do this by improving existing and creating new enemy types that thematically interact with the player's world and defences to create interesting challenges for the player. With this we hope our enemies can inspire the player to meaningfully consider their strategies, e.g., tower choices, tower placements, resource collection & usage, and justify the tools at their disposal.

Sub-features

Refining existing enemies (Tank, Speedy & Squirrel):

• Updating existing enemies to use the Enemy Movement API

• Setting goal to enemy base

• Improving of existing interactions such as attacking

• Refining enemy designs

• Potentially include enemy levels into base enemy class for later "levels" in the game

Interesting Interactions

• Creating new enemy interactions with the world (incl. map/terrain, player character, resources, tree types) with the purpose of promoting interest gameplay.

Creating new enemies

• Creating new enemies with features and interactions that are meaningful with game elements (e.g. a deer enemy that traverse obstacles or terrain that would be difficult for squirrels)

Milestones

• [x] Rework melee attacking
• [x] Racoon stealing resources interaction
• [x] Bear (TankEnemy) special ability
• [ ] Squirrel and Bear character design
• [x] New enemies (Moose) with interesting interactions (random movement, attack player if close)
  • [x] attacks and follows player if nearby
  • [x] heal enemies
  • [ ] Attack animation/type of attack (maybe charging)
• [x] Unit testing of generic enemy classes
• [x] Fix code smells (if any)
• [x] Bear (TankEnemy) "stomps" terrain. This broken terrain will slow down entities.
• [x] Enemies come as wavies

Members of Team 11

• Ryan Phelan (slack: “ryanjphelan”)
• Craig Harvey (slack: “craig”)
• Blair Garton (slack: “lambo-blair”)
• Qishi Zheng (slack: “qishi”)
• Wei Shan Liew(slack:"tl")

[charvei]

Progress so far:

• Enemy attacking has been improved to a melee range attack. We are having difficulties with increasing the reliability of attacks actually hitting when they should -- at certain angles of enemies coming in to their target attacks don't register when they should. In the coming week we will try to fix this
• We would like to change the implementation of basic stats to be more logical in response to some feedback we received.
• We have contacted teams 5 (currently working on player character) and 1 (enemy movement) regarding creating designs for our enemies to compensate for the lack of design experience in our team.
• We are continuing to work on new enemies and enemy special interactions such as dropping debuffs/items, stealing resources, burrowing.
• We have planned and are beginning to work on enemy waves and spawning.

[whiteya]

Regarding BasicStats, our UpgradeStats for trees were very similar and we were thinking of combining them. Some ideas were:

• Using a map and set/get (implemented, but could be changed to enum instead of string)
• Adding a builder class to create stats
• Interfaces for stats that aren't used by everything (not really sure about this though) We also were planning to add optional attributes (Animations and others)

I was think set/get with an enum that has an attribute type associated with each value. Although we need to see if anyone else has a better solution.

[charvei]

Yep, I think combining them is definitely a good idea. BasicStats is a bit too similar to your team's work for me to feel comfortable about to be honest. We probably are looking to have our enemies 'upgradable' for increased difficulty at some point anyway

That said, our tutor's recommendation was to store stats in respective classes which can then added be to through inheritance. What do you think of that approach?

[lambo-blair]

Added the moose class to the game.

The Moose will randomly roam the map or attack the player if they are too close.

21 Will need a new texture for the Moose class, currently using a placeholder

[whiteya]

I've created a plan for the stats system. I've listed all the fields required for stats and separated them into classes. A builder class will also be required. Animation can be just a single texture. Shooting stats will be stored with the shooting event. Creating shooting events will be handled by the builder class.

[Leggy]

Just a reminder: please update your tickets regularly. This counts toward your project participation.

[QishiZheng]

Week 8 updates:

• Fixed the error that causing crash due to no more enemy target presents in the game
• Tank Enemy now move towards and attacks all trees if trees are in it's melee attack range, if no tree exist then tank bear targets player instead.
• Speedy Raccoon now can move towards resourceTrees, and steal resources from resourceTree if it is in a close range

[lambo-blair]

Moose now heals other enemies and chases player.

[charvei]

Moving enemy waves to Enemy waves and spawning (team 11). due to being quite different from the point of this ticket (enhancing enemies).