Saturday, June 18, 2011

That was a close one!

I opened up the toolset just to fix some jumping points as a bug workaround so we could finish our White Plume Mountain campaign and I started to fiddle with a small area and some creature AI-scripts I've been pushing away to a remote corner of my brain. It's not anything fancy just some fake co-operative behavior from the enemies side.

When the amount of monsters are down to 4 two of them starts to circle (opposite directions) the strongest PC or companion while the other 2 attacks the weakest.
If theres 3 monsters one they pack together attacking the strongest PC. One doing the circling but tries to do nasty weakening stuff when he gets a chance (as when the PC targets another monster) the other two alternates between attacks and moving away.
When they are down to 2, one of them attacks while the other one heal and buff (trying to heal the partner in crime if possible) then they shift. Combing the behavior of circling, moving away and attacking, makes even a weak group of enemies a real challenge and makes the combat fun from a tactical perspective. I just played 40 minutes or so and I think a player might get the idea and see through it so it should probably be about 10 different and maybe random combat dances to chose and combine for it to feel really intelligent.



Then I came to my senses and shut the computer down, went washing my hands and face. Toolset-fever. That was a close one!

/A

(sorry about the English, I'm to lazy to try to read through and correct)

3 comments:

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

I'm very prone to that illness. ;)

Recently, I was working on a puzzle where the script was growing longer and longer and more complex ... then I decided to just stick to an original and more simple idea and the code reduced to only a few lines.

Still wish I had not wasted so much time thinking about it though.

Lance.

Anonymous said...

Ive had that happen to me recently. This seemingly great idea wants me to dive into the toolset (any toolset really) and make something out of this grand idea, but man, not sure if I want to put the time and effort into it. Especially since the playerbase isn't quite what it used to be.

A part of me still wants to create something, so I've been writing something out instead. I probably wouldn't mind so much if I could be a part of a dedicated team from start to finish though.

Kamal said...

I suspect if you offered your services, even on a project that you were interested in but wasn't asking for help, there would be no shortage of takers.