Project AS

A 2d Platformer with combat, enemy AI, inventory systems, and much more!

Click here to see the Game Devlog video I made for this!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Management
3. Project Structure
4. AI
5. Inventory system
6. Water simulation

1. Introduction

This is a WIP game that I worked on for about a month in the summer. The main idea was to make a 2D RPG platformer focused on exploration. This means:

• Complicated and interesting enemy/companion AI
• Dialog system
• Quest system

We will cover these down below.

2. Management

As the project was of a small scope, our GDD didn't get out of draft (Link to GDD) As for tasks, I used Trello as it was simple to use and was very similar to GitHub project boards. (Link to my Trello)

3. Project Structure

General structure of the project is straight-forward:

Assets
    Audio            // Contains audio manager
          Cameras
          Entities   // For NPCs, Enemies, and players 
          FX
          Items      // For the inventory system
          UI
    Prefabs
          Managers
          UI
    Resources        // Keeps mostly data (Scriptable Objects / Models)
          Dialogue
          Items
    Scenes
    Scripts
          Editor      // Script for development tools I made
          Game        // Mainly contains Controllers
          NPC         // Everything related to AI and State Machines
          Player
    Sprites

4. AI

(visual results down below) We have 2 main scripts for making the State machine work:

1. FiniteStateMachine.cs: Simple state holder that switches between states.
2. State.cs: Actual state of a specific behavior

The State class is an abstract class. Many new classes will inherit from it to define their own behaviors. Here are some examples:

Skeleton

The skeleton Enemy npc has many states. One of which is Skeleton_MeleeAttackState.cs It overrides the base functions that can be utilized easily from everywhere without having to worry about the underlying complexities of the Skeleton class.

Companion

This NPC is a companion. After interacting with the companion via E key, it follows the player. If the player attacks an enemy, it will attack the same enemy until it dies.

Multi-staged behavior

This enemy (a boss fight) has multiple stages to its behavior. In stage 1, it attacks with melee (punch, kick) and runs/dash in a slow interval. In stage 2 (when his HP gets to half), it uses its sword and starts dashing a lot more.

5. Inventory

The inventory system was made to be flexible and scalable. Here's a general idea of how it works:

• An Item.cs class is used for all items, which allows the inventory to work on an abstraction layer without being tightly coupled.
• Each item has its own category, such as Equipment (for damage or health boost), Food (eat to regain health), etc.
• The inventory keeps a List of items. However, this would make searching O(n). Therefore, in D_Inventory.cs line 20, I made a TODO to change it into a Dictionary (for O(1) lookup, add, and delete)

• All managed in the editor as a dev tool:

  

The dialog system is also very similar, as it's basically many data nodes connected to each other (AKA a Tree)

6. Water Simulation

A fun thing I wanted to add was water. This would make for greate water sections where the player could swim and swing (has nice tone to it!) I was inspired by what Super Mario Bros. did in their platformers:

The main idea behind recreating this is to Fake it 'til you make it! Using mainly Hooke's law and euler methods (for the surface of the water, since we're basically working with connected dots). Here's a link to an article by Michael Hoffman that explains how to do it.