Day 96-97: Spending Some Time With Friends and the LAST HUMAN FAMILY

These past few days have been busy catching up with good times and good friends (blurgh, it's a holiday, why not?) but I've managed a bit of work here and there.

First off, the last human family. Sounds dramatic, but they're the score items in Robotron, and they have an oddly complex movement system compared to the rest of the enemies and player. So complex that I had to write a new collision system that not only returned a bool if it was colliding, but passed a variable by reference to store the direction to determine where the family member would be going next. The family member can move in 8 directions (cardinal, diagonal), so the direction of their collision directly affects their diagonal movement change.

As for the capstone work, I've been inching myself toward the AI elephant in the room. I'm not too familiar with any kind of AI (nor interested, sadly) but figured that at least a simple AI for enemy interaction in the game would be used. In that case, I've been going through Unreal's creation of blackboards, behavior trees, and decorating pawns with AI control tasks. We'll see how it pans out tomorrow!