Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
Our main focus this week has been on adding special abilities to AI characters. We're approaching this in a very general way to provide for a wide range of abilities that could have very different uses. It's not just a matter of "use ability every few seconds", but proper tactical considerations to decide what ability should be used when. There's obviously a big difference between using a charge or spitting something at a target, each has ideal conditions, limitations and compromises which just like a poorly timed attack could have very poor outcomes. Good tactics are essential, and we also want ability use to feel natural and organic, rather than scripted and predictable, which is always a little tricky. There's a good mix of ability specific and general considerations and tactics that fall into a shared framework, as well as considerations like conserving resources.
As well as tactics, AI skill level is also important in the same fundamental way as other combat behaviours are. Positioning, range, accuracy, trying to predict what the opponent is doing and so on varies dramatically between a low and high skill AI, which in some cases is very important and completely changes the difficulty of an encounter.
The context here is also broader than some creature with a hard coded attack. It makes a lot of sense to handle this case and AI using various thaumaturgy powers in the same way. We're going to be giving each AI individual its own selection of abilities or powers at their disposal and allow them to decide what to do with them. We're basically unifying the whole system and essentially treating creature innate abilities as if they were unique thaumaturgy domains and going through the same systems and mechanics that players are subject to when using powers. This approach has a lot of advantages both now and going forward.
We're off to a solid start with this, solving key technical issues and getting the fundamental AI behaviour in place, which we've already been testing and seems to work well. We have a bit more work to do for the specific abilities you'll be seeing, but as usual we can't really go into details here without spoiling things that we'd rather you discovered playing the game.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
Our main focus this week has been on adding special abilities to AI characters. We're approaching this in a very general way to provide for a wide range of abilities that could have very different uses. It's not just a matter of "use ability every few seconds", but proper tactical considerations to decide what ability should be used when. There's obviously a big difference between using a charge or spitting something at a target, each has ideal conditions, limitations and compromises which just like a poorly timed attack could have very poor outcomes. Good tactics are essential, and we also want ability use to feel natural and organic, rather than scripted and predictable, which is always a little tricky. There's a good mix of ability specific and general considerations and tactics that fall into a shared framework, as well as considerations like conserving resources.
As well as tactics, AI skill level is also important in the same fundamental way as other combat behaviours are. Positioning, range, accuracy, trying to predict what the opponent is doing and so on varies dramatically between a low and high skill AI, which in some cases is very important and completely changes the difficulty of an encounter.
The context here is also broader than some creature with a hard coded attack. It makes a lot of sense to handle this case and AI using various thaumaturgy powers in the same way. We're going to be giving each AI individual its own selection of abilities or powers at their disposal and allow them to decide what to do with them. We're basically unifying the whole system and essentially treating creature innate abilities as if they were unique thaumaturgy domains and going through the same systems and mechanics that players are subject to when using powers. This approach has a lot of advantages both now and going forward.
We're off to a solid start with this, solving key technical issues and getting the fundamental AI behaviour in place, which we've already been testing and seems to work well. We have a bit more work to do for the specific abilities you'll be seeing, but as usual we can't really go into details here without spoiling things that we'd rather you discovered playing the game.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
