Hunters in the Forest

Hunters in the Forest

Team
ReHashed#3171
Ðeus Ex Machina#8157

Development started rather quickly, we had a concept and it seemed simple enough so we went with it. A lot of the project got removed for reduced scope, the original plan was much more complex and worked well enough… until it didn’t anymore. The movement of the Hunters had broken and I didn’t know why. Still don’t, but I managed to create a Senses system which takes into account a noise system and a sight system based on a controlled raycast which is layered.

Two sets of ray casts go to two different distances, one operates a kill option for the deer and doubles as the investigation range for the player. If the player raises his visibility too much in this area, the hunter notices them and shoots. If the player reaches the inner layer unnoticed, they become noticed and are shot.

The noise system however is based in two areas, a statistic that tracks the hunters sense of hearing, and the fox, in this case, which broadcasts noise to the surrounding area’s objects if able.

The union of these two senses took a great while to figure out, but doing so created spatial awareness for the hunters… but the result was better than we expected. We needed to figure out a way to interrupt the route of the hunters and return them to it after their investigation was complete, but the issue we discovered we didn’t fight, and turned it into a feature. We meant to have a temporary waypoint be made and for the hunter to return after investigating it. However, what wound up happening was an active waypoint system that constantly makes a waypoint as long as the fox has raised its visibility too high, or makes too much noise in range of the hunter. 

This means that you can literally lead the hunter into the woods and get him stuck. This led us to another issue where we needed to create a timer for stuck hunters. If a hunter gets themselves stuck in any way, they have approximately 20 seconds to make it back to their waypoint or find the fox before they are reset back to the start of the map.

Once all the pieces were made and roughly in place, we spent the better part of 2 days polishing everything we could. A lot was learned, we had a great deal of fun creating this game. Given more time, abilities, and knowledge I feel this game could have been taken to a much higher level.