Since I was young I have always been fascinated by how the characters in games worked. I was especially interested in how smart and reactive many bosses felt and acted.
For my final project in my third year at university, I created a boss fight to act as a tech demo for boss AI and behaviour. This project was inspired by game such as Dark Souls, F.E.A.R, Shadow of Mordor, and Alien: Isolation.
The main aims I wished to achieve in this project was to make the boss feel lifelike and intelligent, which meant designing them to respond dynamically to the player's actions and make mistakes.
This project was also an opportunity for me to learn more about AI programming and design in games so I used it to learn about state machines, navigation, and behavioral design.
Each boss behaviour and feature of the boss fight was inspired by contemporary examples in the industry and designed with player experience in mind.
I needed to consider how the boss' behaviours were communicated to the player. I did this by adding animations to the boss, putting UI elements onscreen to inform the player of important information, and having pop up for attacks that were blocked or missed.
While working on the project, I needed to ensure my code was maintainable and scalable. To do this I created management classes and abstracted out common functionality so I could easily reuse and change the code if needed.
