Game Design and Artificial Intelligence - Bournemouth University

Game Design and Artificial Intelligence
David Hopkins
Implementation
When starting development of the game, a lot of time was spent designing the character and crew
AI side of the program but most of the coding time was involved with the space combat system, as
this was pivotal to getting a functioning and fun product. It required these visuals for understanding
what the player is attempting to achieve. The main factor proved to be time and learning. At the
end of this project, there was an emphasis on producing something that was fun to play and
interactive with the player but could still carry across much of the concept work. Once the space
combat system was developed, there was little time left to spend on the crew FSM system, however
some items have been implemented to indicate what could have been if more time was available.
Handling data
When designing a skeleton structure of the game engine, the file system was split into three main
sections. One of the sections would be dedicated to the interior of the ship, checking on the
conditions of each of the crew members and working out the respective work rates. The second
section consists of the ship fighting, updating and drawing all objects in the world space. The final
section is the main section where everything must be handled including the opengl setup and calls
to the other two sections.
This was the first time I had attempted to do a programming project using multiple files, and
therefore it was key that I passed the correct data around for the game engine to operate. The main
pivotal point for this was between the ship combat and the ship interior. The player ship
information needs to be passed to the heads up display, the crew work rates need to be sent to the
combat system and both sections need to be able to handle key presses. The first attempts at
producing the space combat system were flawed due to a lack of cohesion when attempting to pass
data to and from the space combat file. After learning the uses of object orientation, this problem
was simplified. Object orientation allows information that previously couldn’ t be shared from
specific modular files (eg. shipCombat.cpp does not know of objects in crew.cpp) to be accessible
by the use of placing the data in sets of interacting objects [macey00]. Using classes to contain the
data, through inheritance and the use of the STL(standard template library) [bateman00] I was able
to format a much neater and more accessible system.
Page 12 of 22