Logan Devlog - 10/11/23

Escape the Ship is a co-op puzzle/horror game. The premise is that both players are separated on a damaged ship while an alien is hunting them down. They have to overcome obstacles that require help from the other player while avoiding the alien at all costs since there are no weapons.

My primary job has been to work on the Alien AI. The Alien has three movement modes so far: Wander, Hunt, and Switch Sides. The alien will wander when it does not see a player, hunt when it sees a player, and switch sides when it has not seen a player for a long time or the other player uses an alarm to distract it.

VENTS
Vents are how the alien switches between the sides of the map. They are given a tag, either P1 or P2, which represents the side they belong to. When the Alien switches sides, it chooses the vent closest to the targeted player to appear from.

ALIEN
Wander
In wander mode, the alien picks a random navigable location within the radius of its targeted player and moves there. This is the Alien's default mode.
Hunt
In Hunt mode, the alien will follow the targeted player. It will enter Hunt Mode if a player crosses its vision. Hunt mode will end if the alien loses sight of the player and it will return to Wander mode.
Switch Sides
When the alien switches sides, it will find the nearest vent and travel to it. Then it will disappear and wait for 5 seconds before reappearing on the other side. The vent it chooses to appear at is the one that is closest to the player it is now targeting. Switching sides is only triggered after the alien has not seen a player for a long time or when a player uses an alarm to force the alien to switch sides.

INTERACTABLE
I also designed the interactable system for our project. Interactables are anything that the player has to walk up to and press a button to use. All interactables are children of one base Interactable class. Each interactable has an overlappable collision box and a Use event. If a player is overlapping an Interactable, they can press E to call the Use event for the interactable. When playing on controller, the player presses X to use an Interactable. Interactables also have a tooltip that appears in the bottom of the screen while a player is overlapping one. The information displayed in the tooltip is able to be controlled through a string on the interactable called WidgetText.

CODE UNIFICATION
Ricardo and I have been working with separate files to avoid conflicts, but this meant that very few of our features have been compatible with each other. To prepare for our first available packaged build, I decided to unify everything we have done so far. The vast majority of this process involved converting blueprints over to the interactable system. To do this, I just had to change the child class to the Interactable Blueprint and replace any Input Action events with the Use event. For every blueprint I changed in the unification process, I created a duplicate to house the final code so that any unpushed progress would not come into conflict. This meant that I had to replace a lot of references in the blueprints I was unifying with the new ones I was creating to make sure they worked correctly. I would also fix any bugs I found on a case by case basis.