Fintails Have Grown Bigger Blades and Smoother Controls

Even though I was lucky to afford enough time after work to focus on my game project, I cannot help but notice that combined with the fast speed, the sometimes super-responsive AI, and the short fin blades make the game extremely difficult to clear.

Therefore, I introduce a notable change to make clearing opponents easier:

BIGGER BLADED TAIL FINS

By tweaking around with the shape and size of the new tailblade, that presents some challenges with the aesthetics since in prototype form, those look more like tadpoles, despite looking at some images that some fish do have long slender tail fins that are not fanned out. That also means incorporating a familiar tail fin that is commonly seen with fishes with this extended blade that pokes out more like a sword.

From several play throughs, without adjusting the close distance range for AI, speed of fish entities, nor having a way to allow smooth drifting for quick turns, it is at least slightly easier to remove opponents from the field. Still more experimentation needed.

SMOOTHER CONTROLS (Quick Update 2)

Now that I have smoothed out the movement for all entities, especially the player, the gameplay controls should be much more responsive, which should help take out opponent fish more easily with strategy. Additionally, the refined movement controls also gave the desired results of the AI opponents as envisioned.

FIXED NaN PHYSICS CRASHERS (Quick Update 3)

The most fundamental rule of using any physics engine is to always reject any physics that contain NaN values because if not, then it slowly causes performance lag to the point the game will crash. Thanks to the editor detecting such bugs, I fixed them right away. Now the game runs as smooth as butter.

Change Log

• All fish entities have bigger and longer tail blades
• When game boots up, the high score table gets reset (Delete All Prefabs)
• AI Opponents can now get less stuck by moving away from touching solids towards the next path point, if at least one side is touching the solid.

Quick Update 1:

Quickly tweaked the following parameters to make it easier to defeat opponents and adjusting gameplay balance

• Tail blades have been shortened to resemble more like fish tail fins
• To compensate the shorter tail blades, the speed and acceleration has been slower to allow smoother controls, especially for players that want to sneak in attacks at opponents
• Opponent AI will now respond when closer to the player instead of further away
• Opponent AI Behavior tweaked on the following:
  • Green - Shorter distance required to trigger bump attack
  • Yellow - Shorter distance to trigger attack and shortened 
  • Red - Shorter distance and no pause after spin attack, goes straight to fleeing
  • Blue - Similar distance, but otherwise the same aggressive chaser

Quick Update 2:

Movement controls have been smoothed out so players and opponents behave appropriately

• Any fish entity (opponent and player) will accelerate forward when they move straight
• If any fish entity moves while still turning, drift velocity takes over while slowly decelerating
• If any fish stops moving, then they will slow down some more
• Player controls are a lot more sensitive to direction, making controls snappier
• Now the blue opponent fish finally behaves exactly as intended:
  • When seeking a closest target, they will spin and dash forward across the board, requiring quick avoidance or taking gamble of hitting the swift and speedy opponent

Quick Update 3:

New behavior for AI integrated for smoother gameplay experience and fixed up NaN physics issues.

• New AI Behavior: Patrol - Does movement towards waypoints when far away from any player. If somewhat closer, then go into seek mode. Some opponents may not use this feature.
• Seek mode now chases any nearby player instead of being used for waypoints. Patrol is used for the purpose of waypoints.
• Now the general order of AI states are as follows for conditions and action (and each can be toggled on and off by the developer):
  • Patrol - Requires customized behavior to move towards waypoints, standard behavior does not use Patrol.
  • Seek - Seeks towards nearest target, when player gets somewhat close to an opponent.
  • Attack - When opponent is really close, make an attack. Default is that player and opponent are head to head.
  • Flee - When opponent is close, and player faces the tail blade, it will flee as default behavior. Can also be triggered after attack.
• Fixed up all known issues of NaN input from physics component since that is the major source of causing performance lag and all scripts acting wonky. Now the game performs smoothly.

Quick Update 4:

Some minor fixes

• Control sensitivity fixed due to movement direction already being normalized, which makes axis value change does not need to be as high
• Fixed some path-find null errors
• Urchins' physics are now kinematic, meaning they cannot be pushed away. They now become more like hazardous obstacles.
• Slight change of levels, replacing the closed quadrants from waves 16-19 with a more open-ended level
• Changed mass of small fries to very small size and adjusted AddForce with acceleration for movement direction to be independent of mass
• Added some boundary return code to all active entities, which should replace the hollow warp entry gate trigger since sometimes the physics can get crazy.