Tutorial 3 -- Navigation

This week I created some simple enemies and allies that could be controlled/destroyed. Baking the NavMesh was a straight forward process, though I struggled to get jump spots and drop spots where I wanted them. Were I to design a level with Unity's NavMesh in mind in the future, I would probably do a few things differently (most notably, sharper edges to create more defined play areas). That said, the resulting NavMesh was relatively robust, and the result can be seen below.
 

I duplicated and shrunk the player prefab and gave it a blue coloring in order to create some ally robots. These can be seen below, navigating to wherever I click in the world. I was impressed by how well they could recalculate the route to the destination in cases where an obstacle blocked their path. In the GIF, they are running around to drop off a ledge and come from the same side as the player.

It seemed natural to have the enemies chase after the little robot allies, or the player; whichever was closest. After testing this idea, I found that you could bait the enemy robots with your allied ones, then pick off the enemies with the barrel cannon (once the ability to destroy the enemies with barrels that had enough velocity was added of course). This very simple game play loop added some strategy to what would otherwise be a simple third person shooter. Weirdly, the clunky and somewhat slow moving player character makes sense in a setting like this, as it encourages you to use your allies as a sort of shield against the fast moving opponents while you line up your shot.

In the GIF below, you can see an enemy dropping down from a ledge and catching up with the player in a matter of a few seconds. There is no game-over/player health mechanic in the game, but I imagine that the player would die quickly (maybe even instantly) if an enemy ever caught them.

A great expansion to this game play loop would be if allies could be killed, adding a resource management to the game where the player should avoid letting their buddies take too much damage or else be vulnerable in future encounters. There would then need to be some way to get more (perhaps defeat enemies could become allies) to offset the increase in challenge. Either way, watching the little red ones chase after the little blue ones is amusing.