Working on AI (Patreon)

Hello! The first thing I did in the past two weeks was adding in a hints system to the UI to point the player to certain things; it also unintentionally works as a jumpscare because it pops up with a loud noise.

Then I finished implementing doors into the game so they are compatible with enemy AI now. Some enemies take longer to access doors, whereas some enemies will just slam them open. The difficult thing was making sure each enemy will have an "idle" behavior it defaults to, in case it gets trapped behind a locked door and can't reach the players. For this, enemy AI needed to determine what parts of the map are accessible and which are not. 

The next big problem I need to fix for the game's AIs are that they are all 'omniscient.' Most of the AI's I have created for my games have been omniscient, since it's A LOT easier to code. Even the "Hide And Seeker" and "Phantom" from It Steals technically know where the player is at all times; their search AI just tells them to travel to the closest rooms to the player in descending order, crossing them each off a list until there's no more rooms to search (then repeat.) 

The problem with Lethal Company's AI's is that they won't always have a clear line between "chasing mode" and "searching mode", and sometimes you'll want to lose them by taking lots of turns. And an AI cheating becomes a lot more noticeable when there's 4 players around. So I'm trying to come up with a system I can use for all the AI's in the game that simulates a "line of sight".

But anyway, since doors work with the enemy AI now, I could add in a new "big door" or "airlock door", or whatever it should be called. These doors have codes written on them and can only be accessed through the ship computer. The obvious comparison is GTFO's security doors, but one actual inspiration is the door system from Duskers. But where opening a bad door in Duskers would cost you a dispensable drone, in Lethal Company it would cost you your friend's life.

After that I added 4 new tiles to the randomly generated maps, which is a lot even though it might not seem like it. Before I get into making a ton of new AIs, I wanted to make sure the maps will be good enough to house them.

This, with some changes I made to the map generator, has upped the amount of good maps the game generates. No one who has tested the game with me has guessed that the maps are randomly generated without me telling them first, which seems like a pretty good sign.

The last big thing I worked on was the sanity system and the ambient sounds system. The sanity system is a bit of a secret mechanic; right now it just means that when you spend more time alone, you will hear more noises (and stranger noises). I call these kind of sounds "creaks" even when they aren't really like wooden creaking sounds. 

What's delicate about this is that I don't want to bombard players with random sounds that mean nothing, or they will just learn to ignore it. That's partly why some "creaks" will be synced so all players can hear them. This system is pretty new, but it already makes the place feel haunted.

The next thing I'm going to do is add in more enemies and generally just more content. The game is almost complete as far as features go. I have some great ideas for enemies, but they will be VERY complex, so I'm going to start with some simple ones first.