Name: Ants - The great harvest Type : Realtime Strategy
Plot:
Winter is aproaching and your hive still has a lot of food to gather.
Mechanics:
You move your workers around by setting pheromone clouds as waypoints to explore the surrounding area and find food.
On its way betwenn the food spots and the hive your workers will encounter enemys that must be avoided.
Time will be limited so you have to control several ants at once and choose the place and number of waypoints for each ant wisely because once set you can’t delete them anymore.
15.04.2013 (Day one)
Created a scene with some simple primitives for ants, waypoints, food spots and a hive
Coded a basic movement system with navmesh and waypoints
Today I spent about one and a half hours on creating workarounds for accessing multiple waypoints on the exact same spot until at last I remembered there was a property called “hitObjectList” in the collision sensor. Doh
Control of the cubes ehm I mean ants works fine now for multiple ants and multiple food sources.
After the frustrating start I went on modeling and texturing some assets for a change (see picture below).
16.04.2013 (Day two)
Movement of Ants is about to be finished but may eventually need more work as the map / navmesh gets more complex
Modeled and textured a flower, grassblade and a stone
I fear there’ll be no or only little time for the challenge tomorrow.
The task of the player is to guide the ants savely from the different food spots to the hive. It’s not pure AI because you cannot set waypoint loops but only a straight sequence of waypoints.
The player has to choose a decent strategy to succeed.
For example:
He could follow one ant and set one waypoint after the other to guide it step by step which gives you the best control over it to react to enemys but since one ant alone won’t be able to gather much food you’ll need some more ants.
The other exterem would be to set all waypoints from the hive some different food spots and back at once. The ant will follow it’s route collect food and deliver it back to the hive but since the wps are already set it / you can’t react to enemys that eventually cross its way.
The golden path will probably be to set a few waypoints for an ant and “park” it somewhere save where there are currently no enemys around and switch to the next ant and so on.
Another acpect to take in consideration is the amount of food an ant carries around. You can take every piece of food directly to your hive where it is save or go on harvesting and return with a bigger amount. But if your ant dies all the food it carries will be gone.
(Worker) Ants are unable to fight and die directly on contact with enemys.
I think i’ll add some Soldier caste that protects the workers later after the the challenge is over but they will be very slow and expensive to breed so they will be only useful to “block” certain areas from invading enemys.
This was a very productife day. The user Interface is nearly finishd and I started the basics of the first level.
More than half of the time is gone and there is still a lot of work to do but I’m sure i can make it in time (at least I hope so :p).
18.04.2013 (Day four)
created the user interface (visuals + scrolling logic)
modeled and ambient oclusioned the basic shape of the first level
I spent nearly the whole day bugfixing and added more functionality to the user interface.
19.04.2013 (Day five)
Fixed a severe ant ehm I mean bug that caused the ant to freeze when touching more than one waypoint at at time.
All stats in the UI are now updated in realtime according to happenings in the main scene
Unfortunately one critical problem still persists. If two ants walk directly against each other they sometimes get stuck head to head.
Collision is set to sphere so the “drifting” works most of the time but it will definitely cause problems when huge amounts of ants are involved.
Id like to make the ants being able to walk through each other as if ghost was checked. But enabling dynamic / ghost makes the ants fall through the floor.
Sorry I haven’t seen your post earlyer. I’ll have a look at the collision masks but I don’t think they’ll make it into the bgmc version anymore.
Only workaround I found is to breed a third ant and drive it into the two colliding ants in order to “free” them.
21.04.2013 (Day seven)
Created the menues (Mainmenue, Instructions, Credits, GameOver and Highscoretable). the latter is still unsortet but it will have to do…
polished up some minor things and added animated waypoints.
There are still many essential features like soundeffects which are missing and won’t be ready till tomorrow.
Unfortunately the enemys still didn’t make it into the game.
But I’ll definitely go on working on the game if there is interest in the community.
Here is a screeny of the instructions screen which you can already learn by heart till you’re able to play the game tormorrow :eyebrowlift:
22.04.2013 (Release Day)
Tadaa, here is the release version of “Ants - the great harvest” for BGMC 8.
(The game was created with blender 2.66a, older versions of blender may cause problems) Download (~8MB) I wish you fun playing!
I got rid of the collision issue today. Man I could kick myself for not having a look at colision masks earlyer when the challenge was still running. Just two clicks and everything worked fine.
For fairness I am going to hold further updated back until 7th of May when the voting is over.
, what is the task of player? or is “pure AI” ?
