Ai

After getting the bullet behaviors in DET-33 into a good place, the next system to crack was skills: the active abilities a player picks up as they level. I’d built ability systems before and always regretted the same thing, so this time I restructured them to be stat-agnostic from the start. The mistake I keep making The tempting way to define a skill is to reach into player stats. “Healing scales with your wisdom, damage scales with your level.” It feels right and it ruins you later. Every skill becomes coupled to the stat model, balancing one thing ripples into everything, and you can’t reason about a skill in isolation. Years ago I wrote about balancing game mechanics by drawing the tree of which stats feed which. The lesson I took from doing that is that the fewer edges in that tree, the better, and skills reading stats directly add a lot of edges. ...

This summer I’ve worked on a behavior and trait mapper in C++ that establishes entirely dynamic AI routines, allowing actors to propagate and interact with each other in unique ways. You can think of it as a super sophisticated Langton's Ant, where the goal was to identify the reflective sociological impacts of personal traits from as minute and mundane as a vegan to criminal desires like burglary, sexual preferences like pansexual or uncontrollable hunger desires of a cannibal, etc. The graphing of the application was with Vis.js. ...