So this game was released on the 3rd of December, and like the last devlog I’m posting this on the 21st of December. I’m still catching up.

The theme for this game was “Fire”, and is my last game based on the 4 elements. None of them ended up that good, so I think I’ll go pretty light on sticking to a theme from now on.

The idea was very simple, I wanted to learn how to use Behavior Trees to drive AI, and I also wanted to create a simple fire propagation system. I thought it would be cool to have the AI walk around a level, avoiding obstacles dynamically. They would also try to avoid areas with fire. If an agent was set on fire, it would panic and run around the level, making things even worse. I think I originally wanted to make something kind of like Infectonator, where you have a game where everything is calm, but you kick off a domino effect and everything ends up spiraling out of control. Sadly I didn’t get to implement success/failure mechanics or more complex AI, but that’s what I was moving towards.

What went well

• Learned the basics of Behavior Trees and the Behavior Designer Asset
• Setting the place on fire and seeing the AI freak out is fun. Kind of like how it’s fun to kill off Sims.

What could have gone better

• Like last week, the game is extremely simple and barely counts as a “game”
• Even though the AI is doing a lot in the background, there is very little feedback to the player for them to infer the AI state.

What I learned

• Feedback is essential to making a game enjoyable, or even playable. Especially for inferring AI state. Watching the agent run around and freaking out is fun, but having them shout expletives would have been even better.

Summary

Another bad project. At least I learned about Behavior Trees this week.

As always, if you want to try out the prototype, the link is right here:

If you wanna play around with the code, I also have a link to the GitHub repo if you click here!