Musings of 2012
Look what I've found over at the Game Producer Blog:
Imagine there’s bunch of goblins guarding a treasure cave. Each goblin would have motivations, such as these:
- Need for food (avoiding hunger)
- Shelter (avoid rain for example)
- Being safe (for example, sticking with a bigger group or perhaps running away)
- And so on…
Now, our hero arrives near the treasure cave and thinks for a moment about the situation. In our typical RPG, you’d usually draw your sword and hack’n’slash em.
But what if we could instead have AI that reacts to different stuff. For example, hero could leave food near and make noises that attract goblins to check out the noises. When goblins go check noises (that would be programmed in a common “guarding behavior” AI), they would see food… and hungry goblins would remain there to eat the food. Others might instead return. If there wasn’t any food, all goblins would return back.
Or what if hero uses a rain spell: it starts rain and it causes goblins to scatter: some go find shelter at nearby trees… some perhaps would go back to cave.
Really, there is not much I can add to this post, other than the fact that I really love the idea and would be interested in implementing the idea in some game. As a matter of fact, Dwarf Fortress, does something similar (though not in a RPG setting).
Edit: And now even with the proper link.
- xeophin's blog |
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In case you still have some people around you that make a fuss about the bad influence of "killer games" (as they are called in the German speaking world), consider this (as written in a beautiful essay on game architecture that is totally worth your time to read, but I digress):
Professional Counter-Strike players […] have been known to turn off the graphics entirely because it is “distracting,” leaving only the most minimal in-game representation of walls and floors. In their mind, the surface textures on a game level might be likened to a tennis court with a neon strobe-light floor […]. That narrative skin doesn’t matter because that’s not how the residents of de_dust understand their home.
Not exactly news to me, but it proves that I'm right: good players will see past the metaphors that are painted over the game mechanics. They see the innermost workings of the games, the little cogs and wheels that click into each other – and with that knowledge, they will beat the game.
First person shooters are, in the end, not so different from chess. A complex ballet of action and reaction, of knowing when to go and when to stop. An exercise in spatial awareness.
Those people that are still fascinated by the shiny pixels, the hyperrealistic dirt splattered over nondescript ruins are likely not very good players at all – and mostly too young to play those games anyway.
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Every gamer knows those buildings that are just standing in a level for effect, to make it seem like you are standing in a huge, buzzing city. But whenever you try to enter one of those doors, you just bump head-first into some flat texture.
The thing is – the same thing happens in the real world as well from time to time. Which is exactly why the bldgblog's post on subway air vents disguised as houses has such a gamey feel.
Makes you wonder whether you could reverse that – create levels that seemingly consists of pure facades turn into actual buildings, where stuff is hidden, where dungeons open up. Question is – how do you visualise that? Directly followed up by the question of whether the general public is ready to play games that are meta on some level.
Yes, I should still play Robert Yang's Level with Me.
No, not this one (although it is pretty cool, too). This one:
Oh, the Japanese weirdness knows no bounds.
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