Boss Battle style AI

[rakk]

Bit of a preface, long time lurker of Invector's boards and 3rd person asset(with interest of personal usage in the future).

Alas given my prior experiences, I feel I might as well ask away what has been eating at me (since my personal experience game development wise is unrelated to AI area of development, and I have hardly touched AI).

What I am interested in, is essentially either finding a middleware solution/system or as necessary creating one(depending on my company's budget). I would like to find a more efficient option to avoid Hard-coding every single layer of a complex Boss fight(also boss fights can be a subjective idea in game design, as clearly the boss fight could be a simple puzzle and not a foe needing to be defeated).

Quick idea of what I am looking for and I do realize there is complexity involved when ever AI is involved. Some quick reference material...

• Monster Hunter Series- Known for "Hunting" large monsters 2 to 4 times the size of the player, the Monsters play out like a typically advanced boss fight found in most other video games. The Bosses behave like a believable animal, with "states" of enrage, injury, suffering/panic(potential to call ally AI to backup boss) and in these "states" the battle could drastically change in style, all potentially at a moments notice. It's a action rpg style game but the Boss Battles have several layers of depth involved in them to keep the player's alert the whole fight, where basically that is the whole experience of the game, everything other element of the content is designed to leverage the boss battle's of the game.

• Dark Souls Series- Another commonly known Action RPG, not as dynamic as the Monster Hunter games, but still the game has complexity and positioning and solid AI ground work to make the game hard for players(this can purely be game design balancing, alas games are built on several pillars). The bosses in Dark Souls will take differing combat actions, depending on the situation, allies, distance checks, perhaps the area of the combat arena the player is in(ambushes, AI defending a objective point/object)
  
  
• Legend of Zelda Series- Don't believe I have to explain much here, but alas the bosses take a simpler style boss fight of destroy the Health Point gauge, except in the Zelda series they may implement puzzle/platforming elements into the Boss fight, to further add depth. I gather in a broad sense after the puzzle is completed they simply either use a object collision trigger with the puzzle element to cause harm of a hard-coded amount to harm the Boss(alas some many potential options when you hard-code everything manually, just very time consuming)                                                                                                                                                                                                      
  
• Shadow of the Colossus- Basically fighting giant's and climbing up and down till the user finds a weak point, similar to the game's above, find a weakpoint and exploit it to win the boss fight.
  

Personally I am looking for complex Boss Battle style fights in a broad sense, where a Boss can have several "Stages" so to speak (This is easy enough to grasp the steps needed to move forward from a general stand point). Alas these stages can be met at 100's of conditions to cause the boss to take certain actions or go to certain areas in the game-play space. Now I understand this can be done manually, and by setting up a bunch of triggers and manual way-points(just tedious work).

Though the time to develop everything in a hard-coded nature is not entirely where I would like to invest company time, as budget-wise I believe it can be better used else where. Thus I am looking for a potential Middleware solution of a Boss Fighting AI that out of the box could clone AI of a game like Dark Souls, or Monster Hunter and the games listed above. I wish to set up several hitboxes to trigger either increased/critical damage points, trigger custom events(such as monster hunter's body dismemberment system) and comes with possible procedural/simple way-point tools for the a Designer/Developer to quickly get a boss battle into prototyping/balancing cycle.

Basically like in any game project, it's best to create reusable systems then to literally hard-code every aspect of the game. Thus my search for possible middle-ware solution or some tricks of the trade I haven't thought of employing from others who are more experienced in AI concepts.

[Invector]

AI is a very complex subject, we only develop our AI to be a simple example of common enemies that do almost the same thing of our controller does (they even share the same animator controller) so basically all we need was a agent controller.

We don't have tons of experience with AI, a few years ago back in college we did a third person adventure game like zelda with unique boss battle and it was all done with hard code (it's easier when you already have a specific behaviour in mind, but is still painfully to do) and now that we're looking more into AI we're seeing that we can't simply create a AI template or framework without a behaviour tree, it can't be done.

So, if you're looking for a tool to help you develop unique bosses, definitely go with something that has a behaviour tree or something, it will make your life a lot easier 

We thought about doing a more advanced AI pack with a behaviour tree included, but it would simple consume A LOT of time, so we will continue to focus on the controller and create a AI Template more focus on melee/shooter with the basic features, so you can quickly create the 'default enemies' of you game.

[sickscore]

The term you are looking for is called "Sequential Boss". That's a really big task which should definitely be planned out well before adding a single line of code.

Personally I would probably use the Behaviour Designer. It will take a while to setup the AI behaviour, but after that you will have a really solid enemy ready to kick some innocent players

I don't think you have alot of alternatives, if you don't want to hardcode every single boss fight behaviour.

[rakk]

Perfect, thank you for the responses. Mostly wishful thinking on my part, but never hurts to ask and who knows, I may have over looked something as AI development is not my area of past experiences. As Sickscore mention's "Sequential Boss" never even thought of that terminology until the mention.

Hehe one of the level designers won't let me near his nav-mesh's after I messed with something in the inspector a long time ago in a previous project back in college(at least I didn't commit the mess I made, but it was funny watching his reaction).

[tharindu]

Jul 17, 2017 23:04:41 GMT sickscore said:

The term you are looking for is called "Sequential Boss". That's a really big task which should definitely be planned out well before adding a single line of code.

Personally I would probably use the Behaviour Designer. It will take a while to setup the AI behaviour, but after that you will have a really solid enemy ready to kick some innocent players

I don't think you have alot of alternatives, if you don't want to hardcode every single boss fight behaviour.

 Interesting. I am a total noob when it comes to AI and have no idea how things are working over that end. To the best of my ability from the research I've done, I decided to go with ICE to setup my AI behaviors. I did not think about boss battles in this case. 

Have you used ICE ? if you have do you think it allows for the same things behavior designer does ? I too plan to have some sequential bosses in my game but they're far into the future since I am only prototyping right now. 

[kano]

Yes, both Behavior Designer & ICE are popular choices. Both allow for "sequential" behaviors, for example when health is low, run away, or increase movement speed then use different attacks etc. It seems like Behavior Designer is the most "battle tested" has been available long time and uses "proper" behavior trees, whereas ICE is more friendly to newbies but is much newer system.

[tharindu]

And I am sick of waiting for the ice guy to release his 1.4 version officially. It's been ages and it's not here. On the other end I hear some people complain about behavior designer. Good thing was I got ICE at 30 bucks which is definitely not a loss at all. I would try the behavior designer later seeing that invector has given up on trying to build their own as well.

[jrackley]

Jul 18, 2017 15:17:43 GMT tharindu said:

And I am sick of waiting for the ice guy to release his 1.4 version officially. It's been ages and it's not here. On the other end I hear some people complain about behavior designer. Good thing was I got ICE at 30 bucks which is definitely not a loss at all. I would try the behavior designer later seeing that invector has given up on trying to build their own as well.

We tried to use behavior designer as we own that as well, but at the time I did not have the time to put into it to learn it better, it can do really complex things but they are extremely confusing and a Pain to figure out (well, at least if you don't have experience in the area,lol), it does some other things out of the box rather well though.

Another behavior tree one that we do not have yet, but receives great reviews and a lot of people tend to hail is NodeCanvas.

And then there is Panda BT Pro which actually has a ton of possibilities, but is more on the scripting end but really flexible.

[kano]

Jul 18, 2017 15:17:43 GMT tharindu said:

And I am sick of waiting for the ice guy to release his 1.4 version officially. It's been ages and it's not here. On the other end I hear some people complain about behavior designer. Good thing was I got ICE at 30 bucks which is definitely not a loss at all. I would try the behavior designer later seeing that invector has given up on trying to build their own as well.

Yeah it takes long time, but the developer is only one man and ICE is very large system, if he had team it would be much quicker I think. Imagine if all Unity asset store devs came together to make ultimate unity game, it would be like dream!

Anyway I don't think Invector has total given up on AI, he says they will make basic one for shooter or melee characters, with "standard" behaviours what we would expect in that type of game. I think it will be similar to AI in RFPS asset, but a little more advanced, such as take cover (because it is already possible in next big version of shooter controller) and call for help etc, for using with standard combat / companion enemies. Anything more advanced we need to use dedicated AI system. One thing is clear, and that is AI is not easy to make...

[Invector]

We just change focus, the idea is to delivery a top quality AI Template and not a Framework, the difference is that you can customize the template but there are certain limits... you won't be able to create new behaviours without coding and changing the core, which you could do on a framework with node editor.

There is already lots of assets for AI on the asset store, so we will create something more simple and easy to use, but yet powerfull enough to create interesting AI's

[jrackley]

Jul 20, 2017 15:21:54 GMT Invector said:

We just change focus, the idea is to delivery a top quality AI Template and not a Framework, the difference is that you can customize the template but there are certain limits... you won't be able to create new behaviours without coding and changing the core, which you could do on a framework with node editor.

There is already lots of assets for AI on the asset store, so we will create something more simple and easy to use, but yet powerfull enough to create interesting AI's

Not that it is super hard to implement on our own, but could you possibly add in Wander within a range in the template to give users the option to use that instead of having the AI always just standing around Idle until you get within range? I think that is a really nice to have that is a basic AI function for almost all templates.

[kano]

Jul 20, 2017 16:08:58 GMT jrackley said:

Jul 20, 2017 15:21:54 GMT Invector said:

We just change focus, the idea is to delivery a top quality AI Template and not a Framework, the difference is that you can customize the template but there are certain limits... you won't be able to create new behaviours without coding and changing the core, which you could do on a framework with node editor.

There is already lots of assets for AI on the asset store, so we will create something more simple and easy to use, but yet powerfull enough to create interesting AI's

Not that it is super hard to implement on our own, but could you possibly add in Wander within a range in the template to give users the option to use that instead of having the AI always just standing around Idle until you get within range? I think that is a really nice to have that is a basic AI function for almost all templates.

Wander & the option to set specific patrol waypoints would be expected by most users, I think.

[tharindu]

Jul 20, 2017 16:12:32 GMT kano said:

Jul 20, 2017 16:08:58 GMT jrackley said:

Not that it is super hard to implement on our own, but could you possibly add in Wander within a range in the template to give users the option to use that instead of having the AI always just standing around Idle until you get within range? I think that is a really nice to have that is a basic AI function for almost all templates.

Wander & the option to set specific patrol waypoints would be expected by most users, I think.

Waypoint configuration is already there. Take a good look  

[steak]

Jul 20, 2017 17:00:48 GMT tharindu said:

Jul 20, 2017 16:12:32 GMT kano said:

Wander & the option to set specific patrol waypoints would be expected by most users, I think.

Waypoint configuration is already there. Take a good look  

Was going to say the same thing.  I have all of my enemies and characters set up with waypoints using the current template.  Granted I am also using Ice for some behaviors as well for some characters and spawners.

[kano]

Jul 20, 2017 17:15:12 GMT steak said:

Jul 20, 2017 17:00:48 GMT tharindu said:

Waypoint configuration is already there. Take a good look  

Was going to say the same thing.  I have all of my enemies and characters set up with waypoints using the current template.  Granted I am also using Ice for some behaviors as well for some characters and spawners.

Hehe, you can tell I am new to this controller package!