Sketches

Sundays at AiGameDev.com is dedicated to explaining problems visually using sketches. This article extrapolates from last week’s discussion (thanks Sergio) and explains different ways of looking at hierarchies.
Most developers say they use a “HFSM” in their games. But you’ll be surprised how different their technology can be — despite them using the […]

In last week’s sketches, you saw two different ways to implement simple suspicious behaviors for an action game. This Sunday you’ll see how well these two systems handle an additional attack behavior.

In last week’s sketches about game AI, you learned how to create behaviors by dealing with parts of the problem space at a time. This Sunday’s sketches shows how two different AI techniques solve the same in-game scenario.
What’s the Challenge?
“Implement the suspicious behavior of an immobile soldier. The soldier should respond to unexpected […]

In the previous sketches, you learned what a behavior lookup table looks like in practice, and how it can grow very quickly in size as you add more variables to the problem.
The way to reduce complexity in practice is to “divide and conquer” by breaking down the table into smaller parts. To do […]

Last week’s sketches introduced the idea of a lookup table, where each situation in the game corresponds to a cell in the table. Each of these situations has a corresponding behavioral response.
To help illustrate these lookup tables in practice, here’s a simple example of the behavior of a lazy soldier (long story :), […]

Finding a visual representation of any problem always helps the design process. This new “Sketches” series starts with the basics: how to represent behaviors in an intuitive way.
Think about all the possible factors that your actors have to deal with (i.e. their internal state and external factors), and consider each combination as a […]