Chapter 4. The Road to Thinkable AI

Usually, when we speak about creating a game, we all just think about enemies, evils, and the bad guys. Of course, games are beyond that. But enemies are what usually make a game what it is; enemies and AI are a huge part of the fun. Enemies are what usually give you a goal to finish a level, to use a weapon, or even to take a mission.

Apart from this, on the other side of the game, involving us, the developers, we all are more interested more in AI as the most important part of the game development process. It is not only the graphic quality and performance that make a game more special than the previous one, but also topics such as AI and how smart and lively your AI is.

When it comes to creating AI for your game, Unreal Engine comes with amazing content. Have you ever liked games such as Mass Effect, God of War, and The Batman Arkham series? All these games have been made with Unreal Engine (Unreal Engine 3 most of the time), and all of them have a remarkable AI and boss fights that we cannot forget even after 100 years!

The thing with Unreal Engine is not the games that have been made with it, but the number of tools and subtools that are supported by the engine, which allow you to tune and detail your enemies and AI behaviors. They are useful for even the smallest tasks.

That's the topic of this chapter: understanding the tools, asset types, and how to code in C++ all within the Unreal Engine ecosystem in order to add AI to our game.

By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:

• Build an enemy class and write down all the required gameplay code
• Build logic to detect the player based on the navigation mesh we built earlier using Nav Mesh Bounds Volume
• Use a wide range of AI-related assets, such as Tasks, Services, Blackboards, and Behavior Trees
• Use the behavior tree editor to build the needed behaviors for AI
• Add various triggers playing different roles
• Enhance the code that the animation notifies in order to call a function at a precise moment
• Practice creating animation blueprints and retargeting

Let's get started!