Silence
ROLE
AI Programmer and Level Designer
DESCRIPTION
Silence is a sci-fi, stealth RPG where the player infiltrates and steals as much as they can from the wealthy. You, the player, come from a failing technocratic society which has been corrupted by the wealthy elite, and have turned to crime in order to survive. During different heists you may come across wondrous devices and can either decide whether to donate, sell or keep these items for future missions. Either become the legend you’ve always wanted to be or spark the dawn of a new era.
Silence was a prototype I developped, in Unity3D with one other programmer and five artists for an assignment. My major tasks involved implementing the Enemy AI to facilitate stealth and block out a level design for an artist to polish.
DEVELOPMENT YEAR
2021
GENRE
First-Person Shooter, Rogue-lite, Stealth, Action
PLATFORM
Windows PC
LEVEL DESIGN
Enemy AI
I created the enemies' finite state machine within the prototype and recreated the AI detection systems that Unreal Engine 4 provided. Each enemy agent has the following system:
Hearing
I created a singleton manager that would cross-reference active agents and their positions relative to each active sound. A sound would specify the hearing range, volume decay and who made the sound. Once an enemy is within range of a sound, they register it for future processing.
Sight
Each enemy agent has a sight range which is checked each frame for any interesting artefacts. If the artefact has a direct line of sight and is within a specified field of view, the artefact is registered for future processing. An artefact can be the player, an opened door or a fallen agent.
Patrol routine
Within a level layout, several routes have been created to be given to each agent as a patrol route. The route to determine their next target location and orientation before incrementing to the next location.
Reaction based state switching
When processing information from the hearing and sight-based systems, special cases are provided to instantly change the agent's behaviour. For example, when the agent observes another agent, who is in the Hunting state, they will also enter the hunting state.
