Week 5 : Tale of Tales.

It was the third week of the month of July, the year 2020. It was a good week, the week I made a fine discovery, keeping it aside. All is going well and things are slowly coming together. Its was the Saturday, I was asked to join in for the class by my buddy, i was in between the work, so anyways I did. It was Hamza's design class. I got in and was warmly greeted my Hamza and I felt the same, it was my first class in the term and haven't meet him for long. I was in and the primary discussion was about the design aspect of the game.

Both of our teams presented the game and he gave us advices on how to improve the aesthetics, cohesion and project management of our game. He asked our team about the progress made on the past week, as nothing was integrated with the main game scene. so we told him that a few thing were made in the background and each of us will integrate it into the level in week 5.

After we had a break, then he started on with narrative design and story telling class. the class was very interesting and is one of my favorite topics. he explained to us the three Act structure. And what are the essential elements a story should be having weather its for a movie or a game to make it interesting to the player.

The next class was on Sunday and it was a facilitation session with Ahmed and Bing. the class was mainly to observe our progress on the game so far. for programmer department there is considerable amount of progress but the animation/art dep. seams bit behind the schedule. Bing looked into the issue and provided the necessary advice required to proceed forward which was to focus more on finishing the primary sketch and moving forward to further tasks.

We programmers presented what we got, was expected we started with the menu. It was good. then we demonstrated the newer additions to the game like UI and such. then I presented my melee enemies and them destroying the pillar while also jumping over the other enemy. We had a short discussion, picked the tasks for the next week and and the class ended.

The next class was on Monday, it was a codding session with Ahmed. We started with recapping and explaining the math behind the 'T' shaped formation. Ahmed asked us about suggestions on how to make it and Srikar suggested a compound system which I liked. were you make one square and attach it behind another rectangle thus forming the 'T'.

Then Ahmed gave is a very detailed math lesson on how to make a custom vector based formation or positioning. the gist of it is that the cardinal directions are custom unit vectors and each x, y, z and multiples of the certain unit vectors based on the center point. which was a very cool way of looking at it. Then he asked me and Aniket to explain our last weeks formation example, and we did.

After that we had a break, then the class resumed on discussing about a new concept called "Hierarchical AI". This concept in simple terms means, the decisions are made in layers instead or one unit/agent considering, observing and comparing of all parameters and finalizing a decision out of. The concept looked like a chopped up version of normal AI but now many parametric observation and compression part is taken car by a separate entity. Diagrammatically it would look like as shown below.

After giving an overview he asked us to make a simple example scene were we can demo this theory put into practice. so I made a simple scene were the soldier unit becomes shielded when they are close to a hostile object. And the observation and assignment is taken care by a manager class.