As the deadline for this module draws closer, I have been making a lot of progress on my project. This week has largely been focused around adding enemies into the level, as this is a crucial element of the experience that has been sorely missing until now.
Navmeshing
Before I could create and place enemies in the level for the player to encounter, I had to first set up the navigation mesh, or NavMesh, so that the enemy AI would be functional. NavMeshes allow developers to designate which spaces pathfinding AI can and can not occupy. Without it’s inclusion enemies would not know where to move, and many bugs would occur as a result.
Other than the small amount that I had undertaken for a project in first year, I have not had much prior experience with creating NavMeshes, much less within the specific context of the Creation Kit. In order to better prepare myself for the task, I re-watched one of Bethesda’s tutorial videos on the subject (2012). The tutorial was dense with information, teaching me the many hotkeys and tricks to creating NavMeshes, as well as how to search for and replace any ‘warning triangles’ that could cause issues for AI.
Creating the NavMesh was relatively straightforward, although time-consuming. Placing each triangle by hand was made much easier thanks to the many shortcuts that the Creation Kit affords the player, and once I understood the basics, I was able to NavMesh each room with ease. There were some areas that I purposely did not NavMesh, including the Crypts of Refuge, as I feel that blocking enemies from entering these rooms adds to the sense of safety and relief they are intended to give the player. If a player is in a particularly hard fight that they need to back away from, they can choose to return to a Crypt of Refuge to allow their health to regenerate or manage their equipment. In total, once I was finished creating the NavMesh, there were 2484 NavMesh triangles present in the level (figs. 1 and 2).
Enemy creation
With the NavMesh created and functional, my focus was now moved onto enemy creation and placement within the level. I have been entirely working with static objects and level assets up until now, so it was time once again to learn a about a new area of the Creation Kit – Actors.
I knew that I wanted to create three tiers of enemy (with each subsequent tier dealing more damage and having more health than the previous), a spider mini-boss, and a final boss. That meant that five unique enemies would have to be created for this project.
Starting with the low-level enemies, I duplicated a Draugr actor from the object window, and renamed it to ‘SJCEnemyLVL1’. From here I was able to access the actor’s settings, changing their health, textures, inventory, and in-game name. For each tier of enemy, I duplicated the previous one, renamed the actor and then edited their settings from their. I named them ‘Lost Blight’, ‘Wandering Blight’, and ‘Wrathful Blight’ respectively. Similarly, for the boss I duplicated a DraugrBoss actor and renamed it to ‘SJCEnemyBoss’, before tweaking the settings and giving it the name ‘Blight Lord’. I also set each enemy’s patrol route using ‘PatrolIdle’ markers which give them set points to move between (fig.4).
References
BETHESDA. 2012. Creation Kit Tutorial Series [YouTube tutorial series]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDKivlGmia4 [accessed 22 March 2022].
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks.