Cyber Commando: Devblog 5: Beginnings of enemy AI

Now that most of Omega's animations and weapons had been made, it was time to start thinking about enemy a.i. I had been using the default mannequin from Unreal as a test for damage/hitboxes and ragdoll physics for my game functionality, however, these mannequins just stand there! I needed to breathe some life into them.

Paragon character

I found that some of the characters from the unreal game Paragon would be a perfect fit for the aesthetic of my game. Upon opening the character blueprint I suddenly realized how complicated and interwoven all the functionality was, so I carefully dismantled the things I did not need, i.e. the player character controller, etc as these would be used as AI enemies. I then needed to adjust the animation blueprint to be more suitable for my needs. I also needed to create a new physics body for the character, to implement the ragdoll functionality upon death.

Drone

I then created a second enemy type of a drone by using a 3D Mesh generator called Meshy.ai. This allows users to input a description of what they would like to see, in a similar way to MidJourney. the user provides what the object should be, what art style, resolution, etc. After a few iterations, I was able to find a suitable mesh. I was then able to import this into the Unreal Editor and make some aesthetic changes. Below is the final version of the drone created.

With these two enemy types made and implemented , I created a simple random roam behaviour with firing depending on the distance between the enemy and player.