For my Flowlab project, the story I chose to base the game off of was a YA dystopian novel I read in elementary school, called "Among the Enemy" by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
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| The cover inspired my design for the enemies (seen below) |
More specifically, the game is based off a chapter of the book where the protagonist, disguised as an employee of the government, sneaks into a military base to gather information. From the start I knew that this would be a stealth game, so everything created revolves around that.
The game begins with the player entering the foreboding fortress. With this introduction level, I utilized the background (shown below) to set the mood, as well as set pieces for the building and trees. To create the illusion of depth, the front archway is non-collideable, making it seem as if it too is in the background.
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| The background I created for the introduction, complete with foreboding mist |
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Level 1
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| The background I created for the interior levels |
The very first level is a simple one. In it you need to get past one guard and one officer. Though the player might not know it yet, the guard is not the real threat; the officer is what you need to avoid.
The first level was also the level where I tested and refined both the AI and the ladder climbing system. Though I could go into detail about the sweat and tears shed into both, I will just show you the finished products.
For ladder climbing, this is what I came up with:
Though buggy at times, it does work.
The AI was far more difficult to code, and I spent an entire weekend (as well as MLK Day) trying to perfect it. In the end came a labyrinth of coded webs and interactions.
The AI alarm system begins with the Officer, who starts each level patrolling their respective area.
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| How they patrol. The guards have a similar system. |
Once they hit one of the patrol stop markers I set up, they halt and shoot out their "eyesight".
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| The officer's eyesight coding |
If the eye bullets hit the player, they send a message back to the officer that sets off their alarm state.
The officer will then send messages to any guards in the level, which activates their search states.
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| Flowlab hates differentiating between objects of the same type, so I had to make a separate entity for every guard in the game |
The guards will start shooting out their own eyes, which work similarly to the officer's eyesight system. If a guard's eye hits the player, the guard will chase them.
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| The whole chase system. Basically it just looks for where the player is on the x-axis and sends the guard there. |
Unlike the officer's eyesight, the guards' eyes will send an additional message if it hits a wall that basically means
"Lost sight of the player, go back into search mode".
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| The guards' internal messaging system |
For each level, the player also needs to grab a keycard to activate the elevators. This is a simple system of the game checking to see if the player does or does not have the key.
And that is essentially how the game works!
