Overview

What is Universal Monster?

Universal Monster (UM) is an easy to use NPC/AI Combat Framework, which is meant to expedite your process of turning your character models and animations into fully functioning AI ready to populate your game world. From humanoids to magical fantasy beasts, UM has the ability to work with any skeleton as long as they have similar animations: idle, walk, attack, hit, etc.

Why use Universal Monster?

You may be like me, and many other game developers, where you have collected many character assets and animations, but you have no easy way to utilize these assets. Simply owning these assets is not enough to make them functional in a game environment. There is where UM comes in. With UM, you can have that asset up and running within the hour.

You may not be an experienced programmer either, which is why UM takes care of all of that for you. Fill out a few arrays or data table entries and your monster will come to life.

How does Universal Monster work?

You provide the character model and animations to go with it, whether you created them yourself or purchased them. You then use the animations to setup your attacks, which can be melee, ranged, specials (such as AoE, cone, line, DoT, status effect) or a bullet trace (which can be as simple as a straight line or as complex as taking gravity, wind and drag into account).

You then get to setup their behavior patterns. You can utilize the sample behaviors provided or create your own. They can be very simple or extremely complex, the choice is all yours. Universal Monster tries not to "hard code" anything. If an option ever needs to differ between monsters, then this option will be made customizable within the UM system.

You are definitely not buying preset behaviors like most other AI packs. UM aims to be the only AI and Combat System you will ever need.