Dev Log 3 - Enemy Interaction

Dev Log - Enemy Interaction

Since Scale Racer is a racing game, the primary enemies are other racers. Using a spline for the race track has a lot of benefits here. The AI enemies can simply follow the spline with an offset and they'll look believable. The difficultly can be easily changed by setting the maximum speed AI can follow and whether it slows down for turns, etc.

Where I've run into an issue I hadn't considered are collisions with the player. Naively, I would have thought to use physics to approximate a collision response, but as I've come to learn, the less physics the better. Instead, when you strike another vehicle directly from behind will give it a boost while you're slowed. If you connect to one of the back corners, you'll instead slide in the opposite direction.

Side collisions will benefit the vehicle with the most sideways motion. This way, you can pull up along side another racer and ram them off the road Road Rash style. I love this idea, but I'm not sure if it's feasible in the time frame. Collisions might need to be simplified.

The only other odd aspect of AI racers are the jumps. The jumps are cool, but they sure add a lot of messing around and tweaking to get right. I think I need to move the landing road a little closer to the jump to prevent the player or AI falling through the world. Originally, I planned to have something more interesting when you missed a jump, but I think the added development time for that would be excessive.

Maybe I can still make something down there like a ton of llamas or something.