Umbra Magna

Link - https://erik-nord-game-dev.itch.io/umbra-magna

Music in the trailer:

In Search Of Solitude by Scott Buckley | www.scottbuckley.com.au Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

First big 3D project, which I did as part of Sunderby Folkhögskola (Sunderby Folk High School), indie-dev course.

This was made in 2023.

What I worked on

I worked on the velocity based player ship movement system. The ship turning is a distance from center which sent the distance info to the player script, which then is used to calculate the turn speed and amount. 

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For the enemy movement and AI, (which I also worked on) is based around a push and pull spring like system. By using this I was able to not only create flocking type of behaviour, I also managed to create  patrol paths and the capability to switch to hunting the player, by using a pull priority system. The AI decision making is a state machine with a percentile chance to change current behaviour. 

The abilities in the game were done by me. They are all scriptable objects, which I managed to make quite customizable. There are missile abilities which uses the push and pull system. The shield and projectile abilities can spawn each of their things in any direction and distance from originating source. There are also hacking and buff type abilities as well. 

I also did the map layout in the combat scene and the enemy spawn system.

Post-mortem

For some reason the patrol system and detection is quite buggy. Earlier they could detect the player using radar, then if they did not find the player, they would go back to their current patrol. That's not a thing that happens currently. Now they just spasm in place. They also have a hard time finding the player, so you need to be right in their face and even then it's still a hard time getting the enemy to go into combat. So in short, the AI system could have been better refined.