A game built for the CI7500: 3D Games Programming Course at Kingston University.

Procedural Generation was a key feature of the game. The game was built in Unity with C# and HLSL. The terrain and environment were generated with the Day as the seed. This ensured that the world would be new every Day.

Another component of the environment was the way it provided feedback to the player on its different "biomes." Movement speed was an area that provided the maximum feedback to the player. The difference in speeds on the surfaces gave the player a sense of their environment.

Speaking of movement, an entirely custom character controller was implemented. The controller was built to be responsive and give the player a sense of control with an added layer of fluid response when navigating the environment. This was accomplished by implementing the Collide and Slide Algorithm, a robust algorithm that focuses on the intuitive redirection of velocities upon surface interactions rather than arresting them to provide a smoother and more responsive movement experience.

An interesting feature I had the opportunity to work on and implement is one that uses the Adaptive Triggers of the PS5 Dualsense Controllers. Specific player actions like attacking and jumping consume stamina(the blue value on the top right). This stamina bar ties in with the triggers. Being low on stamina not only means that your actions in the game are limited, but it also physically gets more challenging to push the corresponding buttons to perform the action.

Enter ChatGPT

A key feature of the game was the interaction with the AI. An AI companion, "Questra," was built using. OpenAI's ChatGPT. Interacting with Questra through voice commands allows the player to get quests, among other things. Questra, through ChatGPT, generates quests with details like the location, the objective, the number of items required, and the enemies and their attributes. Components of a generated quest are then populated in the game world for the player to complete.

Enemies have their own State Machines and reflect them with their animations.
Note: Pixel art is complicated to do, especially in the month and a half we have to make this game. Please bear with me for using a certain asset from a character that rhymes with Dowser. On that note, thanks to the artist, gamekrazzy, for the asset. Link to the artist's page

Upon quest completion, the player is rewarded with a talisman. The talismans are generated by ChatGPT and have their own attributes. The player can equip these talismans to gain different altered stats. The talisman's attributes and values are generated according to the difficulty of the completed quest. Asking Questra for a problematic quest would give better talismans on completion with the added challenge of enemies with better stats. Talismans can stack their attributes, so the order of talisman application can vastly vary the effects provided.

The Titular Feature

BOSSES!

The Bosses in Bossborne are the highlight of the game. ChatGPT generates The bosses with their own attributes, stats, titles, and appearance. The bosses have their own State Machines and animations. The name and title are generated randomly, and a color palette corresponding to the title is generated. A shader is used to apply the palette to the boss, resulting in a unique boss every time in name, appearance, and stats.

To enhance boss fight experiences, I developed a system that allows bosses to record player gameplay and construct a probability map of the moves the player would likely do, given a position, direction, and state. This information is accumulated over a fixed interval(now at 30 seconds) and then is acted on by a statistically driven probability model to determine the likely player move. A counter-state is achieved, which dictates the direction and state the boss must take to avoid damage.

To say that the bosses are demanding would be an understatement. Attacking would leave the player vulnerable to counterattacks, which, with the boss being MUCH stronger than quest enemies, spell a LOT of trouble. Respawns exist in the game with the caveat that the player loses all their acquired talismans and quest progress.

It was a ton of fun building this game, and I enjoyed integrating ChatGPT into my systems. It was definitely, an extensive iterative process to fine-tune the prompts to get acceptable results and certainly did not send me into a flying rage on a few occasions. I have plenty of ideas for extending the game both content-wise and system-wise. I hope to get back to it soon.

In the meantime, I will be putting up the demo here.
I have some changes I need to make, and the game will be down for a bit. Stay tuned for the update!
Until then, enjoy BOSSBORNE!
Download the BOSSBORNE demo!
You WILL need a PS5 controller to play the demo. It might have some input artifacts with other controllers.