jmfrancia/boidstest

Zombie Legion Prototype

Setup

Followed this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dJlhv3hfQ0

Implementation Notes

• Agents spawned as part of flocks
• Flocks have 2 factions: zombie or human
• Flock
  • Iterates over all members...
    • Gathers their contexts (IE objects within 3 ranges: line of sight, neighborhood, and immediate)
    • Iterates through all attached behaviors passing in flock, agent, and contexts to calculate final vector for that agent at that step, passes to agent for movement
• Flock behaviors
  • Set up as scriptable objects
  • Can have filters (used to filter contexts for same flock, specific faction, etc.)
  • Can be composite (combining or lerping between multiple behaviors)
• Gameplay
  • Zombie flock has "follow the leader" behavior following player-controlled zombie leader
  • Zombie agents convert human agents to zombie flock upon collision
  • Human civilians flee zombies
  • Human soldiers try to maintain distance and shoot zombies (no bullets, just insta-kill)
  • Game ends with either all zombies are dead or all humans are converted to zombies

Roadmap

Core game demo

• Start / win / lose UI
• Frenzy meter + button
• Rigidbody experiment
• Character graphics
• Level graphics
• SFX
• Background SFX
• Narrative + graphic for leader mechanic
• Juice
• Agent health + UI
• VFX + shaders (try cartoon?)

Expanded content

• Hazards (mines, barbed wire)
• New enemies (machine gunner, shot gunner)
• New zombie types (scout (kamikazi?), slinger, goliath)
• Powerups (health, speed, defense, attack)
• Zombie group rescue
• More complex maps

Core game MVP

• Tutorial (lab escape)
• Power up choice
• Level up screen
• Agent stats

Meta game

• Large map roguelike vs small map roguelike?
• Map conquest metagame (a la Rise of Nations) vs dynamic path metagame (a la FTL)?

Optimization

• Quadtree
• Computer shader?
• Slow down (or stop) flock calculations outside player view
• Variable frame count for all behaviors (IE calc. every N frames) + load balancing (IE dividing behaviors evenly amongst frames to avoid CPU usage spikes)

Misc

• Cats??
• Teleportation vs pathfind vs rescue for zombies left behind (leader teleports to zombie group if local flock dies?)