Helpless : dog showcase
— PROJECT NAME
Helpless
— ROLE
AI Programming
Options programming
— DATE AND AFFILIATION
March 2023, UQAT
Helpless is a narrative game, made with a team of 22 people, set in a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist is a boy whose dad passed away recently. Now him and his mother are stranded in the desert, and the teen needs to set out to gather the missing pieces required to fix their car.
What I worked on
I worked mainly on the dog’s AI, making three iterations of it. One was meant to have a more aggressive behavior towards the player by barking at him/her and following the player closely. Another iteration is used to lead the player towards the objective, while the third follows the player around and plays with him.
I also worked on options menu, namely on the display settings and control remapping, and making sure their values are saved and fetched for the menu to rewrite the user’s information.
Challenges
The key binding remap was definitely a challenge. It took me a while to figure out how to remap everything with the Input Key Selectors of Unreal Engine, and then fetch the values from the input settings to rewrite the text of all buttons when the player opens the menu.
Otherwise, the AI was challenging because of the different behaviors the dog had to have. Turns out making an AI follow an exact path is more troublesome than having it follow directions.