Release 0.1.1 Update

The last week since first uploading the game has seen a number of incremental improvements to the demo level. My plan is to add a bit of content as well as a few new features each week or two. The key feature added this week was the police officer NPCs which are holding the road block by the police station. They hold their ground firing at any enemies which come too close, you can lead them around and position them where you want them.

I created the police officer model in Blender from the male civilian model with a few modifications and texture changes, the addition of a bullet proof vest and police cap finished it off. Then it was off to Mixamo to add the animations, I must say I don't know what I'd do without this tool, it has literally saved me hundreds of hours in just the last few months and the results are so much better than anything I could have done. I can highly recommend it for anyone who can model characters but doesn't want to then have to spend hours rigging and creating all of the separate animations. Just remember to export as a Unity FBX to save a little bit of time during the import.

The AI for the police officers was based on the standard NPC AI with the attack state copied from the enemies. I'm just using a simple state machine and it's proving a little difficult to debug but for now I'm planning to stick with it as there are plenty of other things to build before I rebuild something that's already been done. One thing I'm not sure on is how to give them the impression of being able to move around with a purpose rather than just chasing enemies or wandering randomly. I feel this will require some additional meta data added to the scene such as "places to attack", "places to take cover", and "places to return to" but this isn't something I've tried before so I'd be keen to hear from anyone who has done this before.

Goals for the next week

• Provide the player a reward for bringing civilians to the police road block, perhaps a health or ammo bonus.
• Add damage indicators to the screen to let you know where you're being attacked from.
• Give the red bears a weapon, at this point I'm looking to give them a flame thrower that they can shoot out their mouth - a fire breathing gummy bear!