#nemisune

BUILDING THE AI

Scuffed photo showing Toy Bonnie in the office

So when I was first figuring out how to make AI for FNaF games, like back when I was on Clickteam, I came up with this: (rng.randi_range(2/(Global.animatronic), 4/(Global.animatronic)) And it works fine. Except... it doesn’t go from 1-20, it went from 0.01 to 0.20. I found later that this gave super wild results as some characters wouldn’t be able to move for upwards of 300 seconds on level 1 which is just downright silly. I then changed it to 0.11-0.30. As of now, it works just fine. I can change the range depending on the animatronic along with whatever specific calculations they may need.

This has a few implications. Whereas there is a small chance of animatronics failing movement opportunities repeatedly keeping them in place for long periods of time, this new AI calculation for some characters will guarantee that they will ALWAYS move within a specific time range.

MAKING ANIMATRONIC MECHANICS AND BEHAVIORS

Freddy was quite easy to get going as was Chica. A bit of a stumper for a moment was Toy Bonnie and Toy Chica. At first, I just had them go into your office until they reached a hard coordinate and if the mask wasn’t on in time, they would kill you. This movement was also scripted in the code itself. This worked but it was just a tad cumbersome. I decided to update this to have them move to a coordinate object that I could freely move around without needing to update the code to. But their movement would continue to be scripted. It wasn’t until recently I realized that I have animation tools in Godot which means that I can now animate this process!

A look at Toy Bonnie’s keyframed animation along with his sprites are shown

I basically did the same for Toy Chica and the rest was history! BB and JJ are pretty unremarkable although they were both annoying to do as well. I also used these new animation tricks on them.

Demon spawns getting ready to strike

Mangle wasn’t too bad to program- at first. She required a new system to be added, the vent snare system. To be fully frank, I’m not quite sure how the map was animated in UCN. Did he update position manually for each phase she moved in depending on the path? Maybe? I hope not. What I did is that I animated out his path with keyframes and then for each time his timer ran out, his phase was updated and that also updated what frame of the animation he was on.

A look at the animation and Mangle’s code.

The main thing towards the end is that I wasn’t quite sure how to make it so Mangle knew which snare was active. I could’ve probably made some code about it but I wanted to try something a bit outside of the box. Mangle has raycasts attached to her. When those raycasts come into contact with an area collision shape, he’ll check if it’s specifically a snare or the “freedom” object. If it’s a snare, she’ll go back to the start and decide on what path he wants to take to get back to you. If she touches the freedom object, she’ll find herself in your office.

“Just hangin’ out!”

Before I move to the next bit I want it to be clear that I wasted like 30 minutes to an hour on trying to fix a bug with Mangle’s vent animations not playing properly. The way that I set it up is that everytime their phase is updated, the animation player will seek a certain point in the animation that corresponds with this. Since the animation was set to 1FPS, that means that phase 1 will go to frame one and so on. But I didn’t change the other animations to 1FPS. So that caused some uhhh. Issues. Haha.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE?

Give love and kisses to this handsome fellow. Without this guy I wouldn’t have the proper office effect quite yet. For some reason, in Clickteam, this effect lags games hard. It seems to be much more optimized in Godot. Due to this, there may not need to be any performance settings for a while. I’ll likely still have to include them anyways but man it’s nice to get some good frames.

MISCELLANEOUS CHANGES TOO SMALL FOR SECTIONS

Destroying animatronics: In order to save on resources when running the game during a hectic night, animatronics are straight up destroyed on the start of the night when their AI is set to zero. This means that they’ll all still be loaded and checked through at the start of a night however so this is mostly for long term performance. A way to load in ONLY the necessary animatronics at the start of the night to help performance in general is being looked into.

Dynamic audio: Some audio within the game now changes volume automatically depending on where it’s located. Previously I believe this was done by hand via code (something like, if in office, set the volume of music box to 0). Now due to the new engine, the game will handle this by itself without any coding being needed.

Music box additions: “Metal Scratchin’ (Sonic Rush)” has been added to the lineup of music that can be chosen at random.

WRAPPING UP

While I disagree with Scott’s political views and morals, working on this project has made me sympathize with him more as a game dev. If you wondered why a lot of the UCN enemies feel like random garbage, there are two reasons

Game design reasons. There would be way too much mental stack and stress from each animatronic having a counter that requires multiple steps.

Making some of these systems really fucking suck and it’s easier to make clones of characters or guys who don’t really do much.

Even though I’m not making a brand new game, some of the changes I’ve implemented bring out inherent changes in how UCN functions which means the design of the game has also severely changed. This is on top of whatever liberties I’m taking as well. Game development is hard man. But it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be a good template. This likely will not be a 100% recreation of UCN down to it’s easter eggs and extras but it’ll give new devs an idea!

Thanks for reading all of this if you even did! I’m gonna try to keep updating this as much as possible.