I participated in an extracurricular Global Game Jam with the theme “Make Me Laugh”, therefore my team and I made a game about selling/buying stocks on a virus-ridden computer. For this project, I was put in charge of creating the Boss.

Boss Blueprint

This “Begin Play” code sets up a looping timer that executes the “Mood Timer” event. It also plays the default face animations for the Boss and sets up the “Starting Location” and the “New Y”, which is used to move the boss around a certain point. Furthermore, the initial value of the “Teleporting” blackboard variable is set here.

Mood timer updates the mood of the boss in the Blackboard every time it is called. If the mood goes below a certain threshold, the “game over” screen is called.

Boss Behaviour Tree

Here, the mood of the boss and if they are teleporting or not is taken into consideration when considering what task to perform.

Move To Task

This code sets “teleporting” to true and then checks where the Boss is in relation to the “New Y” axis. If the Boss is to the left of the player, a random location will be selected to the right and the boss will move there, after which they turn to face the player. Vice versa also applies.

Getting Closer Task

Closer Function (Boss Blueprint)

In this code, the Boss mood is checked against a variety of thresholds to determine what they should do. Once this state is decided: the face animation changes, an appropriate sound is played, walk speed is updated, the “New Y” value is set, the boss is teleported accordingly and then they are rotated to face the player. If the Mood is under 200, the final few steps are skipped to initiate game over. This gives the appearance of the Boss getting angrier and moving closer, as well as more rampantly, when her mood decreases, and vice versa.

Final Game

However, due to time constraints and lack of communication, the final product was a bit different. Unfortunately I had forgotten to add the video files to the appropriate folder for building, therefore the face animations wouldn’t play. Furthermore, the Boss had to be moved from their original position to teleport properly, therefore the original idea of having to wait for the boss to pass in order to see the stock graph wasn’t achieved.