Sneaking through (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I spent the last few days designing and building a new NPC behaviour that allow me to make an NPC react and move through stimulus. This was quite a long ride, but the result is really nice and smooth ! 

This will be really helpfull in the hospital level, as I need guards and nurses patrolling and ready to catch bad babies trying to sneak through. 

The NPC is able to detect if something is suspicious (the yellow ?), come to check the place where he last saw the suspicious thing, then enter chase mode if he detect something wrong (in this case, the player). 

I also crafted a distraction mechanism so you can trigger various environmental items to make the NPC move. For example, you can push a button to stop the power.

So the guard will come to see what's wrong, allowing you to pass a place that he was previously guarding.

This sound really simple, but there were a lot of technical challenges. For example, I had to make sure the NPC correctly reset once he's done checking, and especially if the player got caught, so you don't stumble on a broken NPC if you go to the same place after you escaped.

This behaviour will be really interesting so the second level get more gameplay-involving than the haunted house, so I'm quite happy with it.

The second interesting thing, is that the same mechanism (make an NPC move in a react to a trigger) is the very core of another mechanism that I'd love to implement very soon : the ability for any NPC to come to the player to provide a diaper-check or a change. 

So, now that this is working flawlessly, I just have to fill the level with patrolling guards, nurses and other NPC ! To be honest, the hardest thing is done on that side. 

Now, I just have a few scripted event to do and the logic of the level will be mostly done. Until then, see you soon !