Talk to anyone who’s worked in development of any type of product and they will tell you one thing, change is inevitable. The only thing that’s constant doing the entire development period that changes are going to occur. Sometimes they’re for the better and sometimes there for the worst.
Starting this month there are some major changes coming to project rebirth’s AI system. If you have read previous blog post, you would see that I have scratch that behavior tree system I was previously using and switched to a Utility AI system. Utility AI systems allow for complex simplicity. Instead of having to an order of states for the NPC to cover through, I can allow the NPC to determine the best state based on what is happening in the Game World. While Utility has been helpful, I still been struggling with how enemy NPCs engaged with the player. Engagement is key in action RPGs. The players need to feel overwhelmed and surrounded but still be in control and able to win. I’ve been working on codes battle circles, which allow a group of NPCs to the player character and coordinate attacks. However this system is very very rigid and any gamer who plays the game for more than 2 hours. A few days ago, Blake posted a video on modular tactical influence Maps. And immediately I said I got to have this. Starting today and I am scraping the battle Circle system in favor of modular tactical influence Maps. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, please look at the video below.
