Whisker Witchery
A game about a magical rat sneaking through a witches’ cottage to steal her spell book, sneak, and scurry to avoid the cute monsters that are in your way. With a team of 27 this is a major production. The game was released April 20th 2023. I worked as an engineer for this project. I was key in making the design decisions related to all the stealth aspects of the game. I also designed the AI for the enemies in the game. Whisker Witchery was added to over 15,000 steam library’s over the first week and was #1 Trending on the New and Trending section in Steam’s free to play section.
Mystic Moon Studios
AI Implementation
My main contributions for the project included programming the AI for the fire sprites using Unreal Engine 5’s behavior tree system, developing a simple patrolling system, and creating a patrol point tool. The fire sprites’ AI worked by defining different states that the Fire Sprites could be in. A patrol state, a chasing state, and a searching state. I also implemented a way to use thrown empty bottles to notify nearby fire sprites so that the player could distract the enemies. I made the hiding mechanic work with the AI so that the enemies would go to the place they last saw the player. Once this change was added I needed to modify the hiding mechanic so I added a small slide when the player hides. This way the player could run around the corner press the hide button and slide a little bit so that the enemy would travel to the space the player just was and not attack them.
Gameplay mechanics showcase video. I was key in implementing the AI for the fire enemies and fine-tuning the hiding mechanic showcased in this video.
The high level look at the Fire sprites behavior tree
This view shows off the patrol point tool I made for our designers to implement the Fire Sprites into their levels