Cyber Commando: Dev-blog 5: Starter Enemies!

Now that Omega was working, running around and shooting i needed some enemies to stand up to the challenge!

I started by searching for some appropriate enemies to fit my cyberpunk theme. After a bit of searching the depths of the internet for decent-looking characters, I realized that Epic had released the "Paragon" characters for free, and free to use in any Unreal 5 project.

For my first enemy, I decided to use the Wraith Lunar ops version for my first basic infantry enemy type. To start making the character part of my game, I needed to give it some behaviour. I first needed to carefully dismantle the Wraith and pick the parts I needed. These were the character mesh and skeleton. I also needed the animations however, these were closely tied up in the character's animation blueprint. I had to delete all the timelines and bone rotations in the animations to create a separate animation blueprint that was more suitable for my needs.

The nest step was to give them some life! Utilising Unreal's technology for AI such as blackboards and behaviour trees. I was able to create simple behaviour of moving to a random location with the correct animations playing for walking. Then i made a selector and decorator to detect if the ai can see the player, as well as adding ai perception and stimulus to the enemy. If the enemy detects the player, it will follow to where they are, then if within a distance limit they are able to fire their weapons, again by using the correct animations.

This simple behaviour tree checks a few things:

it moves the enemy to a random location with walk speed and then waits and repeats. it will only repeat if it can't see the player. As soon as it does it will track the players position and fire when within range.