Crustacean Nations
Meet the Team
I worked on Crustacean Nations as the AI programmer for a period of approximately seven weeks. I was added onto the team during development so I was not there for the entire development process. Regardless, the other team members were super nice and helpful with the onboarding process and I was very glad to get to work with them. The other team members who I worked on the game with were Steven Annunziato (Systems and Gameplay Programmer), Maxwell Van Walsen (Sound Designer), John Wright (Artist), Elizabeth Szymanski (Animator), Molli Shuker (Technical Designer), Connor Evans (UX Designer), and Maliki LaForce (Producer). They are all very talented individuals and I would work with any of them again in a heartbeat.
About the Game
Crustacean Nations is an RTS game centered around growing and controlling a crab army. At its current state, the game supports three levels / difficulty modes: small (easy), medium (normal), and hard (difficult) respectively. To play the game, the player is given a set amount of starting resources to begin building their army. The player can choose what type of crab barrack to spawn and where to spawn it. The barracks will begin to spawn a set amount of crabs for the player to command. Crabs can be directed to either gather resources, attack enemy crabs or barracks, or sacrifice to the crab pit. The crab pit summons a massive spider crab to join the army that sacrificed the most crabs after a set amount of crabs were sacrificed. While the player is taking all their actions, the enemy AI is taking the same actions to try and beat the player. This process of collect, attack, defend, and sacrifice continues until either the player eliminates the enemy sand castles or the enemy eliminates the player's sand castles.
My Work
My main two contributions to this project were; a State Machine which controls the actions and behaviors of the enemy crab units and an Enemy Conductor AI, which acted at the other "player" that the user would go against. As there are multiple crab types in the game, each crab needed its own unique set of states to be used with the state machine while also sharing some base states between all crab types.
The State Machine
The State Machine would essentially be telling any given crab at any given moment what action it should be taking, be that attacking another crab, grabbing resources, or just wandering about. While I am not able to share the full code of what I created for this project, I can share a little bit of information about each state. The guard state directs crabs to position themselves around the castle in a defensive formation. The wander state allows crabs to free roam in search of enemies or resources. The flee state was not implemented but was meant to have crabs with low HP return to the castle. The pursue/evade state was not implemented but was meant to direct crabs to take a path towards the enemy castle while avoiding enemy crabs (probably making use of an influence map). The group state was not implemented but was meant to direct wandering crabs to group together in a defensive formation. The patrol state tells enemy crabs to jump into the sacrifice pit (this should have been renamed to sacrifice state but never was). The resource state detects nearby resource piles for crabs to collect. The attack target / building state directs crabs to enter combat mode when nearby enemy crabs or buildings are discovered. The search state is the primary state for all crabs to adhere to in order to determine what actions they should be taking, by checking if any nearby enemies, buildings, or resources exist and if there are none what to do.
The AI Conductor
The AI Conductor needed to have the functionality to do everything that the player can do, but to do it on its own. It also needed to be properly balanced so that the player would have an enjoyable experience going against it. The AI Conductor actually will pick out a select number of its crabs and takes direct control of their state machines to automatically determine their next behavior, mainly telling them to either attack the enemy, gather resources, or sacrifice to the boss pit.
