Week 17 Day 2 - The Development Process and AI

Channel:

Bill Kerney

Subscribers:

2,640

Published on May 12, 2021 6:49:19 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iceWKc3dBW4

Duration: 1:35:51

19 views

1

Today I ran through the development process of a mod from start to finish, and talked about the approach I took to developing CustomTF, which has had over a million unique users over the years. As with all things, start small and go slow. Get your hooks into the code and show that you can change things. For me, it was hooking into the existing Team Fortress menu system to make my menus for building a custom class appear.


Build a minimal viable product and see if it works, and if it is fun. Playtest it with lots of people of different skill levels and get feedback. Then grow it from there. Adding one more weapon to CustomTF was far easier than getting the first weapons able to be purchased. Once you know a pattern for doing something, continuing that pattern is easy. It's learning it in the first place that is hard, which is why modding is such a great way to learn development. You can just follow experienced people's patterns instead of inventing everything from scratch.


Next I went through how AI worked in CustomTF. AI and animations are tied to each other, and we've implemented various common AI functions to handle things like scanning for enemies which are often shared between the various summonable monsters and soldiers we have in the game.