NPCs: Navmesh Agent AIs at your service!

Progress! Menus! Hampsters! Cube delivery service!

Oops reads like an intro to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. No! No, its a nice game! Hampsters are NOT on the Menu. 

Last week our intrepid playtesters busted out all the moves. @spritersblock threw cubes off the catwalk; without them its not possible to finish the game (our tutor says = instant course fail). Then he jumped into the abyss below, and wandered off into the surrounding cave, making it an entirely different game (like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show).   

So we tasked our trusty navmesh agents, the hampsters, with the dire responsibility of securing our passing grade: deliver crucial lost cubes to the right places so the player can finish the game. Now these being hampsters of very little brain, need explicit instructions via C# code…suffice to say I was ecstatic when they finally did what I wanted! 

One problem: everything worked fine on Level 1, but on Level 2 the cubes slowly dropped below the hampster-agent, so when she dropped it at your feet it fell through the floor down to the level below. A “fail” by any measure. So I tentatively wandered over to our tutor Woody and said “When my hampsters deliver cubes…” He stopped me and said “I love this sentence already”.

I love being in an industry where weird sentences are a regular occurrence. Actual things friends have said: "Today I get to animate the avocado!”. Or.. “I can’t get the penny-farthing back inside the spaceship.”  

“…and when she puts the cube down it falls through the floor”. As teammate Jordan patiently explained, the obvious answer is to turn off gravity. Of course. As you do. Silly me. 

So now you can still solve the puzzle even if you go a bit wild with what is clearly a “highly dangerous” cube. I hope you to keep it “This way up!”. 

PSA …no actual hampsters were harmed in making this game. 

I added theme music and ambient sounds that you can hear in the video (thanks John French’s free audio asset download). 

And I made some UI based on freebie panels from GameMakers Toolkit (eg Credits page). 

Then I made (Illustrator CC) some ‘cube’ panels (eg Pause Menu and Settings). 

They might not be Picassos but all the buttons respond to hover and click, and  function as advertised.  Some even animate!

 So the game basically functions & I am a much happier camper this week. Alpha launch in one week!  

Clone. The Game.