ROLE
AI Designer and VFX Artist
DESCRIPTION
Pause time. Attack with a flurry of blows. Start time again. Watch as your enemy falls. In this character action game, slice and dice at robot creatures corrupted by a mysterious force, and use the gem at your core to stop time and gain the advantage!
Chronostasis Trailer provided by Gabriel Salamoney
Chronostasis
Design Process
The difficult task here was making an engaging monster that seemed at least somewhat smart, rather than cannon fodder simply made to be beat up.
When it came to designing the enemy AI we had to keep
two things in mind: Scope and Animations.
Originally, we had in mind grandiose ideas for how enemies should act. We asked ourselves how many attacks they should have, how many attack patterns they needed, and had talks and talks over whether the electroball should chase the player or just shoot straight out. Working hand in hand with the Combat designer, we realized what we could realistically do within our timeframe of 4 months, given our resources.
​
To the left is the original flowchart I made of the AI Structure for the big Rhino enemy in the game. Below is the original flowchart for the Spider.
​
​
For the Rhino, I wanted to make something that could attack from a far range, a mid range, and a close range, but opted to stay far from the player due to its big size and slow nature.
​
The Spider, however, was made to pressure the player while the Rhino charged up its bigger attacks. I wanted it to constantly be searching for the player, and attack in a variety of ways, such as a spin attack and a pincer attack. I wanted it to be unpredictable, alien. Originally, the Spider was split up into two types of units: the Scout and the Head. The scout was meant to search for the player and report to the head, destroying itself after calling out to them. This is because originally we had a much bigger scope in mind, and this would have been interesting for level design.
​
However, as we brought down the scope of the game to a colosseum type fighting game, we reduced both ideas down to their simplest form.
Implementation of this AI was simplified further due to time constraints.