T w e n t y S i d e d

As I play the game, I get this idea that a lot of AI problems are probably due to asymmetrical vision. Not all of them. It’s not that easy to make great AI. But there’s something inherently derpy about an enemy when you can see them and they can’t see you.

There’s a 90’s movie where fat guy Chris Farley plays a ninja. There’s a bunch of shtick where he tries to hide like a ninja but fails because he’s huge. The humor (where applicable) comes from the idea that this 300 pound man is standing behind a floor lamp and thinks he’s hidden, when in reality he’s basically standing in the open. He’s so dumb! He thinks we can’t see him!

I’m noticing a lot of this in my game. Foes are parked behind a wall, waiting to ambush me. But instead of “Ooh, ambush!” I think, “Oh, idiot ninja that thinks I can’t see him.” These are some really dumb AI, but the thing that makes them look dumb isn’t their AI, it’s the fact that I can see them hiding.

So let’s experiment with the idea of restricting what the player can see to the things their character could see.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 7: Lines of Sight”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I apologize if this series seems to be glossing over some details while exploring others in exhaustive detail. This is a very hard series to write and I’m having trouble keeping it all straight in my head.

At any given moment there’s the stuff I’m working on and thinking about. Lagging behind that activity by about three weeks is the stuff I’ve written about and organized into words. And lagging behind that by another week is what has actually been posted to the blog. So when organizing my thoughts I have to figure out if feature X is something I’ve done, something I’ve documented, and something you know about.

It’s confusing, is what I’m getting at.

One one hand, these programming posts are really useful for documenting and clarifying my thoughts. On the other hand, having this muti-stage process with three weeks of lag time is not so useful. Because of this, I’m really eager to plow through this early stuff as fast as possible. Do I document all the little diversions and side-paths that didn’t work out? If so, then I’ll never get caught up. But if I leave that stuff out then this threatens to became a very dry recounting of features added.

I still don’t know how to handle this.

And now I’m about to make the problem worse. Here is a feature from day three. It took me longer to document in this post than it did to write the feature in the first place:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 6: Controls”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

As much as I’d like to ship the game right now, I’m thinking there’s probably a really limited market for games where you fight the same enemy forever for no reason, where you can’t lose, you have no goal, there’s no score, and nowhere to go. And like all my past projects, we should probably avoid getting our hopes up with regards to shipping a game. Barring a steady paycheck, I tend to code as a way of teaching myself how to solve coding problems. This is both personally enriching and financially impoverishing.

But while we’re waiting for me to lose interest, let’s see if we can’t add some more features to this alleged game.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 5: Taking Shape”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.