Week #10: 🙈🙉🙊🍸⛔🚧

As usual, I've been improving the AI and the movement system. Starting with creating distractions: the player can turn off the lights or radios, it can leave doors open for the patrolling guards to suspect, it can turn off the football game the guards are watching and rile them up. And while they are busy investigating what just happened, the player moves undetected with them being clueless to its presence.

Continuing with the progress of last week, we completed the implementation of hiding in cover and hiding inside a closet. In the former, the player can still be detected, but the guards' awareness is lowered. In the latter, the player is virtually undetectable.

With all the stealth building blocks designed, I've moved to create the non-hostile AIs, i.e., the partygoers and the servants. The party goers are variants of our guards, but instead of being patrolling, or investigating, or purposefully going to another location, these NPCs limit themselves to drinking and talking. Well, I say talking, but in reality they only play a "talking" animation, as our game does not have any sound yet.

           

For the servants, they are relatively simple, the NPC is always carrying a drinks tray, when it is empty, it will walk to the kitchen (or wherever we define the refill area), add some drinks to its tray, and traverse the party, distributing out drinks to the partygoers that drink. In turn, these partygoers play a drinking animation when they are handed a drink.

Finally, the player can also interact with the party goers: either disguised as a Waiter or a fellow Partygoer, the player can serve drinks. Due to the social engineering component of 2036, we use this to justify why the (player disguised as) Waiter is talking the socializing NPCs, and to create a moment of introduction between an NPC and the player (disguised as another partygoer). Eventually, we'll have a drunkness mechanic, which puts the drunk NPC in a state to willingly divulge more information.