The Ins and Outs of Enemy AI

My responsibility was to begin working on the AI systems for our enemies. My main focus at the beginning was to future-proof as much as possible so when I started making more enemies, a lot of the framework is already in place. My biggest struggle was trying to plan everything out because I have never had to design AI systems from scratch where all the enemies have different behaviors, attack patterns, and characteristics. Even with all the planning, I still find myself having to go back and add more things the the base framework, change file structures, etc. and it's slowing down my progress a bit. I have managed to make two different enemy types with different behaviors and hopefully using those as a sort of template I can make the rest of the enemies no problem. I anticipate my next challenge to be designing the boss fights. I have limited experience with making boss fights, as the one time I did it was in Unity and did not go very well. Hopefully I can use that experience to get it right this time and make awesome and engaging fights.

Author: Chase Thacker 1/26/2024