I put limited time into game dev this week, and a large portion of the time went into some difficult code design/architecture thinking rather than coding itself.
- New Map Elements: Library, Alchemy Chamber, Armory. These are new room types that contain objects arranged in simple patterns (tables, bookcases, weapon racks) and applicable random assortments of items. I want to improve the variety of the object placement patterns. I sketched out some patterns for the library (below) to visualize the end result and work backwards to develop the generation logic. It got me wondering about the feasibility of an alternative approach: training a machine learning algorithm to generate patterns from a set of example patterns. I’m going to research this next week.
- AI 2.0 Design. Last week’s addition of AI states and actor responses to game events has necessitated more rework than anticipated. The original AI was player-centric; other actors only cared about what the player was doing. The end goal was always to allow actors to respond to a variety of events, but I limited the initial implementation to player events for simplicity. I’m now modifying the design so that actors can potentially act on any event. This requires some optimization as well because, for each event, a check needs to be performed to determine if the actor notices the event. It’s further complicated by the fact that each event may be detected by sight or hearing.
Next week, I’m continuing working on the AI 2.0 coding.
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