The Persona 3 Dungeon “game” is a project based around steering behaviors, obstacle avoidance, and collisions avoidance. In R.I.T.’s ‘Programming for Digital Media’ the students learned about different steering behaviors such as flocking and basic obstacle avoidance. This project gave me the opportunity to learn more advanced steering behaviors, such as:

• A*: A path finding algorithm used in grids of any sort to find the “best” path on both weighted and unweighted grids.
• Obstacle avoidance: Sending out probe positions (whiskers) the entity can predict collisions and avoid them.
• Fleeing and Chasing: An “enemy” would randomly be given one of two traits. Normally enemies follow a set path and use projection to determine when to move on to the next way point. However, if the player gets close they will either run away from or chase the player’s position. Regardless, once the player is far enough away the enemies use A* to return to their initial position along their path.

The layout for this game is highly inspired and uses the music from Persona 3. In it, the player controls a character that leads a party of capsules around a dungeon. Making contact with a set of stairs will send the player to one of four potential floors. I was originally planning on adding health and combat but I have yet to come back to this project.

Controls

• W: Move the player forward
• S: Have the camera look back. Player can’t move in meantime.
• Mouse: Move the camera.
• A and D: This project was my first foray into learning about 3-D game development. The original intent was to have A and D act as buttons which rotated around the character. However, I never quite got it working correctly and therefore it is possible to move the camera outside of the bounds of the dungeon.
• C: Toggle between Top-Down and Third-Person Perspective

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For some reason player movement is sluggish in the first level on my laptop so I went to modify my source files but I found that they were corrupted. Right now I do not have access to my source files and any uncorrupted ones would be on my account back at college. I intend to get it as soon as I can but the player character could potentially move slowly in the meantime.

Download web player to play “game”.