High Concept
Comically robbing shops to appease interesting characters creates high stakes and ultimately relief.
Genre
Thieves’ Paradise is aimed for Stealth-Action gameplay. Focusing primarily on Stealth, as the player navigates Shopping World to acquire items and tools. The player lacks combat capabilities outside of what Shopping World’s store’s provide, and must evade pursuers through frantic evasion.
Introduction
Thieves’ Paradise is a stealth-action heist game with a narrative-driven aspect. Players choose one of six storylines to participate in, stealing target items throughout an over-the-top shopping complex called Shopping World, at the behest of their chosen character or characters. Performance and player choices during the heists will alter NPC dialogue, and dialogue options can equally affect the heists.
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What was my job?
During my time on this project, I worked on the game's AI and AI related systems. This includes things such as: the script for our guard AI, a script for our Camera AI, and a script for our laser tripwires. I also made a system that allows objects to control the targeted location of the guards (via the laser tripwires and cameras), as well implementing visual cue's for the items listed above (A spotlight controlled by the camera's script and the same for the tripwire's particle system).
Project Post-Mortem
Acting as a capstone project for all involved, everyone entered this project with with high ambitions and goals while also hoping to challenge themselves. That being said, I personally used this project as an attempt to find a specific niche within game programming that I could learn about, namely being the programming of game AI.
I also took the majority of time on this project to attempt to challenge my self in the way of not relying on tutorials for issues encountered and instead relied upon past knowledge and Unity API/C# Documentation to find my way out of issues. I found my overall approach to issues as well as my understanding of code to increase vastly as a result of this.
Work Samples
Guard / Chris P. Bacon
Waypoint Navigation
Finite State Machine
Specialized Behaviour
Suspicious
Used for emulating the guard searching around them for whatever their target is
Ranged Attack
Used to challenge the player's ability to sneak around the map, effective for punishing recklessness
Stunned
A state that can be the guard can be forced into from external sources at any point. Intended to allow the player to disable the guard for a set time and create a window of opportunity.