Hello, Tusslers! Terribly sorry for the late post today, I’ve been super busy. It’s not because I was watching Batman. Absolutely not. How could you say such a thing? Anyway… here’s what we’ve been working on this week: An AI!



Fighting a stationary hitbox is pretty lame, huh? And finding friends to cram onto the same keyboard with you is almost as bad! That’s why we’ve begun constructing a bot that will fight you when there’s no one around! Right now, it doesn’t really do much, but getting an AI controlled player to so much as follow you was no easy feat!

Right now, the AI is at a level we like to call “Duckling”. The bot just wants to follow you around the whole fight, and will keep coming back to you no matter how many times you swat it away. It’ll drop down to meet up with you if you fall below it, and it’ll jump up to meet you.

While it took us a while to get this far, progress should be coming quickly as we add more functionality to the bot, and then a while later as we work on making it smarter. This is a pretty big project for us, and especially myself, who has never really programmed an AI before.

The AI is essentially an object that sits on top of the fighter instance, and passes it input commands as if it were a player. For example, the bot would notice that the player is to the left of it, so it will tell the game to hit player 2′s ‘left’ button until it catches up to you. It can only do things a player can, so it can’t make illegal moves like going straight from a dash into a Down Smash or anything like that, it just passes inputs to the game as if the computer were holding a controller of his own.

Right now, the bot can be toggled on or off at the Rules menu.It currently only occupies the player two slot, and will always follow player 1. Easier bot selection will come with an updated CSS screen, since the current one wouldn’t make it very easy to do so.

Other than that, we’ve been tweaking some of Hitboxie’s moveset, and have about 90% of it complete! We’re still missing forward and back aerials, downsmash, and up special and down special. The stage background speed issue has been made better, most computers should be able to handle a game on True Arena without lag.

Additionally, we’ve added hitstop to really sell those heavy hits. Landing a move has a bit of a pause when it connects to make the hit seem a bit more meaty than the floaty way it was before. We think we’ve hit a good balance on the numbers, but if you think the hitstop is too much, or too little, let us know!

Also, I meant to include this little tidbit in last weeks post, but I forgot! On our stages, you might here the same royalty-free dubstep we all know and love (Thanks, Laszlo and NCS!) but you might also find our very own original music! Legendary DJXYZ has been on the team for quite some time now, making awesome tunes to give TUSSLE that epic feel it deserves!