No More Monkey Business

We went with a very human-like walking and punch animation due to scope and what was achievable well. The jump attack certainly is the most exotic making you feel like a monkey in the movement set.

The focus of the game is juicy destruction, hence the combat gameplay was intended to be a side dish, something that adds more value to causing chaos. You can be stopped, but you can become unstoppable. 

One scenario was enemy waves that the players would have to face. Yet while that is fun for shooter-like games, I and my fellow designers agreed that for our melee-focused game that would be a flawed experience. Since the most fun is to outrun or pick off one or a couple of enemies here and there, in between causing destruction. 

While having 2 or 3 different enemies would have been one of my main wishes, it was simply not feasible with our resources (modeling, animation). 

But instead of just spawning in enemy waves, having the 3 AI states and a completely controllable spawner, which was made together with programmer William Sundin. 

I and programmer Michael Gorkiewicz were the AI feature team, creating the design and blueprint logic of the AI.

With the help of miro and just good free communication, we made a good team and I eventually created the AI behaviour tree (on the right).

I bounced the concept off my fellow designers and received positive feedback and some questions, which allowed us all to have a good picture of what we wanted.

Having never done AI before, pieces falling into places, such as the police model, the animations on top of it, and everything finally working out was as complex as fulfilling. 

A clear vision where the individual parts of the game are befitting of the complete game. The combat could be more, in terms of animations, enemy varieties, and polish, but given the time and tech trouble was assessed as good. The one mechanic that we did talk about but had to lay on ice was a combo meter, which would have added quite a lot of satisfaction and challenge to the combat and overall gameplay experience.

Only chose what you can master, and learn with good documentation/support available. Double or triple the amount of time needed to solve issues if you have a short development timeline.

We went with Unreal Engine's 4.27 experimental chaos version, since working with chaos while having level instances was decided to have an upside. In the end, however, while interesting to learn and adjust to a process of multiple people being involved in using a new system, there was too much of a negative impact. 

Crash errors even with industry mentors and teachers couldn't be ironed out and a swap to unreal engine 5 was not timely or realistic.

Since we had problems of a technical nature and although they were unsolvable by even industry mentors, simply an engine shortcoming, it was a difficult balance between pressing for alternatives and trying to wait and making the best of it. 

The team communication was very good, but it's hard to say whether pressing harder, earlier to try and see if the project could have been moved to Unreal Engine 5 would have been better.