Fortress Infiltrator: How it Works

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.

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.

The background I created for the introduction, complete with foreboding mist

Level 1

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.

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".

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.

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.

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".

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!