Hey Folks,

So part 3 of the Monster Ai discussion, and today we’re going to take a look at the door interactions and how they continued to develop.

At this point the advantage of having a more bestial creature became apparent, and the idea to give the monster the ability to knock down doors began to develop. To rectify the Nav Mesh Obstacle issue, I removed the ability to trigger it from the locked state, and instead created a door check system within this monsters AI. This meant that the monster would navigate towards doors again, and then perform an action based on the doors state.

The system would then play out in the following manner:

1. The creature arrives at a door

2. If it is unlocked, the creature opens the door, if locked, the creature begins to listen for the player.

3. If the player is within a set distance, and is not holding their breath, then the creature will destroy the door and begin a hunt. If the player is not within a set distance, or is holding their breath, then the door will turn on its Nav Mesh Obstacle for 10 seconds, blocking the path and forcing the monster to find an alternate route.

This system worked well and gave the creature a much more intelligent approach to making its way through the house, while also making the doors a more tactical element of gameplay, as unnecessarily locking them or failing to hide properly now resulted in the permanent loss of a defence.

This did not entirely fix the problem though, as the creature could still become trapped within a room, and so a dice roll was incorporated into the creature’s door interactions. After the previous steps had been taken, instead of the Nav Mesh Obstacle activating, the creature chooses a random number between 0-100, and if the number was higher than an adjustable value it would destroy the door to continue its search.

This system then had a ‘3 fail chance’ implemented to avoid the creature becoming trapped for too long, instantly destroying the door on the third attempt. If an attempt failed, the Nav Mesh Obstacle would then activate, and the creature would walk away to explore another area.

To create the door smashing effect for the creature bursting through, a 3D cast had to be created of each door using a simple cube. Pro builder was then used to make polygon shapes representing individual shards of door, and these were then collected into one object, with a particle effect added for fine debris. When the creature destroyed a door, it would instantiate these chunks and particles in the door frame, and then apply an explosive force emanating from the creature to propel the debris away from it, as if the door had just been blown open. This was effective as a base effect but will require further work to make truly realistic and immersive, with more detail applied to the individual shards.

Phew that was a lot to talk about, but I hope you found it useful/interesting to read!

Next time we’ll be finishing off the AI discussion, and release is drawing ever closer! If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you follow It Will Find You on Gamejolt or Itch.

Until then,

Nick

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