Bond: Wish of the Forest is an action packed roguelite creature collector about making friends and fighting alongside them.
Work together to rid the forest of evil spirits and save your home. Explore procedurally generated levels, find powerful upgrades, strengthen your bond with creatures, and uncover the destructive spirit's true intentions.
This game is being made as part of University of California: Santa Cruz's game design capstone series.
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Creature Behavior Tree
I worked with other programmers to make a robust AI for our creature. Originally we tried using a Finite State Machine but we had made a design decision to make our creatures as likeable and “alive” as possible. We then decided upon a Behavior Tree to allow for more modularity and scalability.
This allowed us to make multiple different personalities for our creatures that spanned from aggressive combat behaviors to more utility focused scavenger personalities. These may sometimes also affect the idle behaviors of the creatures in various ways. These personalities would replace large portions of the behavior tree. Using a behavior tree allowed us to procedurally generate different creatures with various personality and look combinations.
Creature Abilities
Towards the latter half of the project, I focused mainly on fleshing out the abilities of the creatures. We had a pool of abilities unique to specific species of creatures that could be given to each creature in pairs. These involved making placeholder SFX, creating the logic and behavior for the ability effects, and balancing the abilities themselves.
This involved heavy collaboration with both the art and design team to make sure my implementation fit both the vision from the design documents and the art direction for the creatures.
Awards & Recognitions
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Our work on making a procedurally generated world and creatures earned us the technical innovation award.
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We were voted amongst our peers for having our year’s outstanding game and team.