Block Battlefield

Block Battlefield is a battlefield simulation program where two teams of blocks fight each other to earn points from holding a control point “king-of-the-hill” style.

There are 5 classes of blocks each with unique roles and attributes:

Knight – A tanky frontline fighter with limited range and average speed.

Archer – A backline fighter that shoots volleys of arrows at distant targets. Arrows will likely miss moving targets and can collide with other arrows, groups of archers are most effective when spreading damage among multiple targets.

Cleric – A frail but fast healer unit that sticks with nearby allies and heals damaged fighters within its range. If a cleric has no non-cleric allies in their follow range, they will panic and run in random directions at a high speed until they find an ally to stick with.

Ninja – A sneaky and fast infiltration fighter with low health. Ninjas fight like knights until they see a backline fighter which will cause them to drop a smoke bomb and disappear, they will later reappear behind enemy lines and attack backline units with their preferred targets. being clerics.

Mage – A slow backline fighter with weak defenses. Mages will attack by conjuring 3 icicles. Icicles will rise into the air and then once they reach their maximum height they will turn towards the Mage’s target and quickly shoot at the target enemy. Mages can retain their icicles indefinitely if all potential targetable enemies are killed before the icicles fire. If the conjuring mage is killed while their icicles are readying to fire, the icicles will shoot outwards in whatever direction they are facing at the time of their summoned being killed.

Conception

Block Battlefield was a short term solo project for an A.I. assignment that had to be done with the Unity BehaviourMachine plugin. The project specifications required a certain amount of A.I. behaviours to be developed but the creative decisions of the project were open-ended. I felt compelled to make a king-of-the-hill styled A.I. battlefield simulation with unique unit classes.

Development

BehaviourMachine was deprecated at the time of the project’s development but was required for use in the assignment. I made strong use of the plugin and was able to navigate some of the less than ideal documentation to build an understanding that allowed me to efficiently construct 5 classes of fighters for the project. I spent some additional time creating the character visuals with Maya and Substance Painter to make sure that the classes of fighters were distinct enough for a viewer to follow. Since the A.I. was the focus of the project though that required me to prioritize that development over additional visuals/props. Upon completion of the project there were 12 different states with majority of them being unique to specific classes in addition to time and development spent on other core functionality components of the project. Such components include the scoring/hill system, the modular respawn system, a camera controller, and behaviours for prefab projectiles.