Fear & Mischief is a game that is the result of the second group project at PlaygroundSquad that our team has been working on for 9 weeks.
The game is a 4 player multiplayer game, built for Playstation 4, with a split-screen, where players try to escape from the mansion that is being haunted by a summoned monster. To achieve that, the winner has to be the last one alive, collect souls from other players and unlock the exit door.
A full gameplay video of a single match of Fear & Mischief
Areas I've been working on during the project
AI
The biggest part of my work during the development of the game was creating an AI that would be the biggest threat to the players.
The approach that I thought fit the best was making a state machine in order to easily handle transitions between states but also to make it easier to add new behaviors if needed.
By the start of the project, the main goal for monster behavior was to patrol the mansion, search the hiding spots inside of the rooms (which got removed from the game later on), be aware of the sounds player makes and search the location where those sounds were made. I have added a noise level to each player and some of the items that are supposed to make noise. Noise value rapidly changes when being increased and gradually decreases over time when no new noise is made. The monster is always aware of every noise, but only enters alert state when the noise level is high enough for the distance between the monster and a noise source.
In case the monster ever sees a player (player is inside of adjustable field of view of the monster), the monster is entering a chase state. While chasing, the monster is moving faster. If the player manages to break the line of sight, the monster still follows to the last known location and takes a look around before going back to patrolling state. During the development, some new behaviors were added, and only two of them got to the final version.
Since multiple conditions could have been fulfilled at the same time, a priority level for each behavior was added to prevent monster from jumping in and out of state when she should not.
Scream behavior: while patrolling, the monster has a chance to start screaming, which locks her movement while screaming, but heavily increases her speed for a few seconds after the scream.
Eye spawning: every time the monster gets attracted to a sound source, she saves the location of that source in order to later determine what rooms were the most commonly used by the players. After that, she can spawn up to 4 eyes in those locations that add to her field of view and get destroyed and respawned in a new location 10 seconds after detecting a player.
Some of the removed behaviors:
Camouflage: while searching a room and not finding anyone there, monster can hide inside of the hiding spot.
Sprint: after either scream or camouflage, when the monster sees a player, she will sprint in the direction towards the player (but she cannot stop until she hits a wall or another object). In case monster did not manage to catch a player, she gets stunned for a few seconds, to let the player relocate.
Sound implementation
From the start, we've been planning on using FMOD for implementing the sound. Unfortunately, due to some problems with licenses and different versions of FMOD, we could not use it anymore. So I had to adapt.
Since I could not use FMOD project that already had everything we need, I had to improvise in order to get the sound effects into the game. Luckily, I had all of the sound files available. My implementation of sound had two different stages.
Stage I - Create a mess:
First version of sound manager was done a night before the beta presentation of the game. Even though it worked as intended most of the time, it was not pretty to look at and definitely not easy to use, since each type of sound source had its own method that had to be called. And each sound source component was attached to the actual object that made that sound, which caused some difficulties.
Stage II - Embrace the mess:
Once I had more time to spend on reworking the sound manager, but also once I got the final sound files, I decided to clean it up. Even though storing all of the files still had to be done somewhere (more than 200 different sound files), the most challenging part was finding a way of handling arrays for the sounds that would fit, since we had 4 different types of sfx (one for each player model). I decided to use two-dimensional arrays for the player sounds. When it was done and some reorganizing of the hierarchy was done, I managed to fit all of the functionality into one single method for each type of sound (player, monster and background music). It was much easier to use and worked out quite well!