UnEarthed Games In Hiding: AI Plots Contract · 1178 days ago
I’ve been quietly hammering away in my workshop for the past couple months.
Working on AI, game plot, game play, audio and doing a little contract work on the side. Lest my silence deceive you, the game is coming along very nicely!
Where are my pretty pictures? Darkness, take your soul!
I’m holding off on new artwork until the entire game is functional using temporary art. This is a lesson I should have learned a while ago, but sometimes you just have to go through the problem yourself no matter how many times others tell you what you should do.
In the beginning, I wanted to get to a point where UnEarthed Gods looked like a game and not just a prototype. So I worked on artwork as much as the gameplay. This was good, in that I got to see the game really come to life, but good only up to a point.
Working on the game in a day showed me just what you can accomplish using the simplest of art, and how much that gameplay does not depend on final artwork. With that new found experience, and a couple months of work, I now have much more of a working game than I did before.
My plan now is to finish the entire game using placeholder art, all my NPC’s are using my main player model, all my creatures are using my shadow beast model. Most items are using the same stone model; most weapons are using the same sword model. Most locations are using very simple buildings to mark their spot. This way I can work on making unique AI for each creature right away, making the core game plot points functional, and making the gameplay flow feel right.
If you are like me and working on art as much as game, you might want to just step back and plow through the rest of your game first using placeholder art. There are so many things that have to be done to get your complete game in place that you may not have even thought of yet. Getting the entire gameplay working will make sure that you do all that absolutely has to be done first. Then you know how much time you have left to do the purrty artwork. Oh, and you also happen to have a working game in your hands too!
Of course, this is all from the perspective of an insane person working on the game entirely alone. If you have an artist to work in tandem with you then you are a lucky little devil aren’t you?
All of that said, I would be an evil man to leave such a patient person without any sort of screenshot! Here’s a picture of the conversation editor I’m using to make dialog trees:
The right hand side shows an alphabetic sorting of all the “conversation nuggets” in the game. The top left is where you edit the main text that displays. The bottom left is where you can add a list of options the player can chose from.
I’m working on the tool as I go adding little user friendly things here and there. I’ve got some nice markup language for tagging important words, aside conversations, and play specific information. So far it’s working out well.
Good sir, it may be naive, but that in no way means it is not correct!
Last time , I described a naive scheme to save and load my AI. Luckily it wasn’t so naive and worked like a charm. Now all monsters and NPCs are saved at whatever their last location was, with their same goals and stats. When you kill them they are gone forever…all is as it should be.
There’s been so many changes to my AI framework I can’t remember them all. Most of them have been small architectural changes making it easier to make new AI, and share actions between different AI. A little work making the pathfinding code I’m using work better, making the AI handle getting stuck better etc.
The next large thing I’ll be working on for AI will be a goal system similar to the action system I have now, but a meta step above that ( Meta he said! ). Currently I am using goals for certain AI, but they are hard coded switches. I’d like to have a hierarchy of goals each AI is working towards, with the ability to share goals between objects. When the AI needs to choose an action it can look at its current goals, decide which one is most important and let that goal decide what the action will be.
Many threads to drive me mad, Many threads until the end
I won’t tell you how many, but lets just say there exists more than one plot line in UnEarthed Gods. And this is enough to drive a man mad. As the various threads weave in and out of each other, meeting at some points, diverging at others, it’s difficult to keep the entire thing straight in your head….well there is no straight!
I figured there must be some good tool that people use to work on interactive plots and visualize them merging in and out of each other. I looked at some screenplay writing tools and book writing tools and it did look like they would be helpful for working on a linear plot, but not for anything with multiple optional plotlines.
I then tried my favorite trick. Buy a set of index cards, write on them and throw them all over the floor. This also became a mess.
The thing that finally worked for me was to just sit down with some paper, pick one of my plotlines and follow it all the way through. Then pick another and follow it all the way through. Once I had done this with all the plotlines, then I could write the key points on index cards and lay them out like a flowchart to visualize how things happen.
As far as tools go, it looks like perhaps the best thing available for prototyping an interactive story is the old IF(Interactive Fiction) software. I’d be interested to try prototyping my next plot with some of the IF software.
Quick, like the ninja
I’ve decided to do a little bit of contracting on the side to keep myself fresh and bring in a little extra money to help with bills. It’s been fun taking a break from UnEarthed Gods to work on different projects, and a learning experience doing contract work.
I’m planning on doing perhaps one job a month. I’m not looking for long term jobs, but if you have a small(read less than two weeks work) programming or scripting job you need done, I’m your man. While I’m very skilled with the Torque Game Engine right now, the nature of what I’m doing here at UnEarthed Games means I’m a jack of all trades. I can do scripting, programming, sound fx, music, art, and website work if you need that.
My rates are flexible. If you have a project you’d like me to work on send an e-mail and we can work something out.
Wait for it. Wait for it…
I’m really itching to get some more game news into your hands, but I have to force myself to keep quiet. I’m under the impression that games are more fun when you don’t know much about them until you start playing. Let’s say you are going hiking. You can look up the trail, find what one has a nice waterfall, read all about it so you know just what rock to look at and call beautiful. Or you can see a hiking trail and decide to explore yourself, with no idea what you’ll find. You might be killed by roving wild dogs…but you might also find a beautiful waterfall or a salamander.
Until next time,
-Clint