I was brought onto the team making Planar Retainer halfway through the project's creation cycle due to my previous team disbanding (see Volte-Fahs). My primary purpose on the team was to create a fun and challanging AI for the player to obliterate. To accomplish this goal, I created a Finite State Machine for each enemy type. My secondary purpose on the team was to create all of the promotional materials related to the game. This included the box, manual, CD, sell sheet and game website.

Volte-Fahs is a 3D puzzle game built off of the initial principles of Lights Out! by Tiger Electronics. The goal of the project was to take the base game and expand upon it, allowing for players to have a level of customization never before seen for Lights Out! type games. We made great strides towards this end in the first semester of the project, building the framework such that the customization could easily be created in the second semester. However, as my teammate received an internship at a company I was left on a team by myself and subsequently joined the team creating Planar Retainer.

On this game I created the AI and core framework which everything else was built upon. To get the AI functioning I created an in-memory graph which tracked which kept track of all adjacencies. I then used a subgraph applied to the graph to switch the state of affected tiles. In order to get the shortest possible solution, I found some great articles online which showed how to solve Lights Out! using linear algebra. Using the information from these resources and expanding on them slightly to allow for the customization which was later to come, I could consistenly build the correct clicks to solve the puzzle.

In Chroma Clash I held two main roles. First was my coding of the AI for the game. To make the AI drive towards its target, I implemented an Artifical Neural Network (ANN) and trained it to drive by having it watch me drive towards the objective. I also implemented a very basic Fuzzy Logic system which allowed for the AI agents to shoot when it sensed something was nearby (be it a player or a turret which it would take over). These two aspects combined created the behavior which you see present in the game.

The second part of Chroma Clash that was responsible for was the menus. The menu system was created using a Finite State Machine. Each state in the state machine had two parts, an "On Enter" and the main body which was executed. By utilizing the FSM's, I was able to create simplistic menus which were extremely functional, were easy to understand, and which looked good.

Plaster your pigment!
Shoot paint across the world and gain control of powerful turrets!

LAN multiplayer!
Color your friends green with your mad skills!

Color outside the lines!
Wide open world for you to lay down your paint against an AI that is as ruthless as you!