Beginning Week 3-4: Loli Employment (Patreon)

Right now I am working on the logic that will drive the autonomous actions of lolis in the town This aspect I refer to as "employment" because it is their job to complete the random tasks assigned to them. This brings me to an important part of game development, scripted sequences.

If you've ever played large scale RPG games, you've probably heard the expression "The NPCs are not scripted and they do everything naturally!". This is usually a marketing phrase to hype up the AI of games. There isn't a hard line as to what's considered 'naturally' and 'scripted' in game development. Scripted sequences usually refer to hand-crafted order of events given to NPCs through scripts, predefined rules. Naturally usually refers to letting the NPCs find what to do themselves, and well, the logic and methods of communicating the information to the NPC could be considered handcrafted or even a script in some instances. So naturally and scripted are very fuzzy concepts.

However, it is important to strive for natural results because that greatly improves the intelligence and immersion of NPC AI. Thus, my take on the underlying principles that should govern NPC logic is chance. Chance is random, fair, and (mostly) unpredictable. I'm a strong believer that chance is a very good tool for creating believable AI. Unpredictability can cause organic strings of events that could look intelligent to one and fool them into thinking it was all calculated. It also increases the possibilities of the order of events so every scenario is different. The system I am writing will provide the lolis with the possibilities and the lolis will randomly choose what to do. I call this system waypoints:

Each waypoint is a point in the town that will have things for the loli to do. As the loli moves from one waypoint to another throughout the day, she will do different things at that location (sit on a chair, walk around, talk to other lolis, etc.). Internally it's a graph of connected points, a maze for the loli to get lost in:

I don't have any videos yet to show off where this is at but I am gearing up for the first v0.8 pre-release beta in 2 weeks which will include all the big new changes since v0.75.

Stay tuned!