Taken from the description of the game's Itch.io page:
Boom and Bloom is a short prototype for a fast-paced FPS game where you use your plants as guns to protect your farm against waves of enemies.
This Game was Made in collaboration with Students from The University of Utah. I was brought on as a Lead Programmer, collaborating closely with the Project Lead to create reliable tools that could be used. Boom and Bloom was developed using Unity and C#.
The enemy has been placed outside its path, seeing as there is nothing else it can do; it will now go to the first point to start its pre-designated pathing.
My most notable contribution to the Project was in the in-depth enemy AI that I had developed. This AI was Dynamic, meaning it could adapt its pathing algorithm and behavior states depending on its local environment.
The enemy has spotted a Tower! Instead of returning to its original pathing, it will now go on the "Attack" as it charges forward towards the tower!
The Unity editor for the AI was made with the designer in mind, where they were given the freedom to adjust the AI's behavior, pathing, and priorities. The designer can individually place down different "points" the AI will go to in a set order. The AI has an adjustable detection radius, which allows it to "view" anything alongside its path. If the enemy sees a tower, the player is trying to defend. It will stray from its pre-designated path to attack that tower. Once it has been destroyed, the AI will revert to its path and return to the last point it was still standing at. The same applies if the enemy AI sees a player; it will chase them until the player is out of its view, for which it will then return to that pre-designated path.
The Designer is given complete control over the AI parameters so they can freely fine-tune as they please.
Everything above this text has been the AI implementations that made their way into the final game. Still, there was originally a different AI approach that I had developed using the A* (A star) pathing algorithm instead. A* is an informed search algorithm that finds the best possible path to its objective using a weighted graph outlining the environment. Using the A* algorithm would've allowed the designers to create rough terrain that would've been harder for the enemy AI to navigate, as well as AI that could dynamically take into account obstacles in a scene and calculate the best path forward with those objects in mind.
This approach for the AI did not make it into the Final build as the project lead had felt that it was overly complex for the project scope and concerns over performance if multiple instances of an enemy running this A* algorithm were to be running simultaneously. Even though this never made it into the game's final build, I still had the opportunity to learn and implement the A* algorithm in private builds of the Boom and Bloom.
If you wish to play the game, download it through itch.io using the following embed.