Whale, Whale, Whale. What Do We Have Here?

This week I was responsible for working with Dylan to get the AI for generic units in a working state. I also kept an open communication with both Jeff Salvage and Gaylord Holder of the Computer Science department to work on getting our JIRA instance moved onto CS servers to make it not crash every 20 minutes.

Originally, Dylan and I set up JIRA on an Amazon AWS server, which we soon discovered worked, but not as well as we would have liked. As in, we didn't really feel like rebooting the server every time we wanted to use the software.

As far as AI goes, I was responsible for the Rush and Gatling units/towers.

Rush

The rush unit has a cone-like AoE attack, which is VERY MUCH NOT A SHOTGUN. This is accomplished through two public variables on the unit class: maxAttackAngle and pelletsFired.

• maxAttackAngle controls the unit's cone of attack, allowing the shots to be more controlled or more widespread.
• pelletsFired controls the number of "pellets" fired by each attack. Each "pellet" is a raycast that is fired at an angle to evenly spread the shots inside the maxAttackAngle. If any of the raycasts hit an enemy, that enemy takes damage.

This unit does not stop to attack units that enter its aggro. It instead does a "drive-by" and shoots units while sprinting to its destination.

Gatling

Gatling units have a single target attack. As the unit attacks a target, the amount of damage it outputs increases. When the unit switches to another target, the damage output returns to the base amount.

Short, sweet and to the point.

What I did:

• Rush unit and tower (3 hours)
• Gatling unit and tower (2 hours)
• Network testing (2 hours)
• Play testing to find out why path finding was breaking (3 hours)
• Assorted art direction work (1 hour)

What hurt me:

• Path finding exploded.

What I'm doing:

• Fully set up new JIRA instance and re-add tickets and workflows.
• Once path finding gets resolved, continue testing unit and tower behavior.