Team for Poutine

Synopsis

What would happen if a poutine appears in the middle of 6 ninja clans? War!

Take control of the mighty poutine and transform your enemies into your allies. Watch out because you lose your range attack when you have the poutine.

Project

This game was made in Unreal 5.1 with 3 programmers and 2 artists and a game designer. All of the project was made in blueprint. Since this wonderjam had for theme "Hot Potato" and we received the sub-themes "COOP" and "PvP", we created a LAN multiplayer game where the teams are constantly changing.
This game received a special mention by the judges of the Wonderjam.

atremblay.itch.io/team-for-poutine

My Part

Artificial Intelligence

Since this game was very big on team play, we needed AIs to fill those teams. I created the AIs to have different comportment depending on their relationship with the poutine-wielder (PW).

If they are in different teams, they will try and go to the PW while killing every enemy they meet.
If they are in the same team, they will follow the PW to protect them from enemy attacks while attacking their enemies.
If they are the PW, they will run to every player in enemy teams and try to convert them.

All of those states are different blackboards and when the PW change, the AIs change their blackboard accordingly.

Crowding (Problem)

One of the biggest bugs the AI had was that they all stack in one big group. I tried different things to solve this, but none really worked.

I tried to add a sphere collider around the characters and if an AI got into this collider, it would try to move out while continuing to go to his target. This didn't work because the AIs would just get out of the sphere collider and get stuck on it. They didn't dodge the collider, and I didn't have the time to try and find a workaround.

After that, I did some more research and found that unreal had a crowd avoidance system. I didn't use the DetourCrowdAIController because I already had a working AIController and changing it this late in the project seemed to be too risky. I tried to use the Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle (RVO), but it caused a lot of problems too. The RVO work by pushing the AI and it doesn't use the Navigation Mesh. When the RVO was at the right intensity to have the AIs not grouping and looking naturals, it would often push the AI out of the NavMesh and the AI would be stuck there with no way of coming back into the game.

After that, and with the time ticking, we decided to keep this bug in the game and focus our efforts in other places.

The Team (The Sleepers)

Programmers :

Léa Bouchard - AI
Alexandre Tremblay - Player Character + Multiplayer
Alexandre Laroche - Multiplayer + Player Character

Game Designer :

Xavier Lavoie

Artists :

Coralyn Potvin - Level Art + Props Artist
Lauryane Chapleau - Level Art + UI assets

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