Particle Effects shown:

• Melee Enemy Spin Attack
• Melee Enemy Dizzy
• Melee Enemy Hurt
• Melee Enemy Death/Dying
  

3D MODEL IN UE4 WITH WRONG UVs

SOME CHANGES

Around week 6, when we started working again on the AI, we noticed that the BP and the state machine were kinda broken. Enemies were not attacking, or the attack sound would play when they were not attacking, they would do their attack animation but no damage was dealt to the player, or another example when they died they would keep playing random animations but not the death one. Also, after receiving some feedback in the first weeks, we noticed that the enemy mesh was a bit too small and was getting lost in the environment. As follow, we increased the scale of the 3D model so that the player's eyes would focus just on the enemies if encountered. We decided to change the enemy from 2 hits kill to 1 hit because we wanted to keep the fight simple and not make the player get stuck in fights for too long, but rather have them as obstacles to overcome quickly and proceed in the level.  Also because the initial idea was to have 2 to 3 different enemies, but during the months the scope changed and we didn’t implement the Brute and Shooter. 

SHOOTER

BRUTE

Same as Reebo the enemy model had to go through the same rework of UVing and rebinding, in order to get the textures working properly; the thing that we failed in the previous trimester too. During the re-UV process, we learned how to create nice and clean seams/islands, and also the advantages of UVing one side and the mirror the UVs to the other side by flipping them. Between Reebo, the enemy, and all the other 3D models we had two weeks of UVing full on, which thought us important techniques and methods to get a proper job done when UVing models. These weeks were very important to step up our project as they allowed us to UV everything and apply new textures to it. 

When the model was ready and reimported into UE, we started rebuilding the animation system first, using some simpler loops but more effective ones. The idle state can transition just to attack or death, attack will transition to dizzy only if the enemy is not dead and then back to idle or dead. This system seemed to work fine and all the animation issues seemed resolved.  We also created a death animation montage so that the death animation could be called as well in the BP, and what we did there was doing when the enemy is killed, disable all movement and play death animation, and after a delay of two seconds destroy the actor. With this little step, the enemies started feeling much more responsive and all animations were playing correctly now. 

PARTICLE EFFECTS 

With all animations working we began giving more life to enemies by adding particle effects, for when they spin, they get dizzy or they get destroyed. We got a UE package to try to minimize the time we would spend on this as these particle effects can be very time-consuming if made from scratch. The package included some Niagara effects that we modified to fit our art style. When these got implemented, the enemy feels changed drastically and made these ones a new complete experience when you are facing them. Now the enemies are feeling alive and more dangerous! We could all start feeling the power of adding these little details to your game once you start polishing.  --> see GIFs

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/infinity-blade-effects --> particle effect package

BETTER BUT NOT PERFECT

For weeks we worked on the enemy BP because they felt very stupid when roaming around and when following and attacking the player. What we should have done was probably create a whole new system which would take quite a long time, but since we were behind schedule we tried to fix what we already had. This system was built by a previous nanotech member during the last trimester. Unfortunately, she couldn’t work with us during these months, so we had to understand how she made the system “work” and try to fix it. We went through a lot of videos and research to try to improve it, but the only thing we could do was change some values in the coding, and the settings of the pawn sensing. We also changed some collisions boxes, peripheral sight radius, and stuff like that. One thing that also seemed to make things a bit better was to change the navigation agent radius to a higher value and enable RVOAvoidance, in the character movement settings. After all these tweaks and the new state machine, the enemy definitely felt and worked better than before, but still, we probably couldn’t have done more if not tried to rebuild the whole system. They work fine, but sometimes they still get stuck into objects or walls and the only way to get them out is to go close to them and get seen.