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The goal for now is to start shoving some agents into the game. The world won’t feel very alive if the player is all alone! Thankfully, artificial intelligence is kind of my specialty. It’s one of the things I feel most comfortable making. In fact, something I learned how to do several years ago will likely come in handy right now! That something is called goal oriented action planning. It’s absolutely perfect for whats needed. That ‘need’ is AI that are easy to create, can adapt to their environment and have personality.

The beauty of GOAP is that it’s not what you might call hard coded. It’s flexible instead of rigid. I’ll even throw the buzzword dynamic into the mix! It’s about as close to alive as I can imagine a pile of code ever being. Your average AI, or at-least the ones I usually make, are typically ran by one gigantic wall of code. You can basically think of this wall as a check list. The AI simply goes down this check list every frame and accomplishes its tasks in order. It has to have a answer for every edge case scenario in order to prevent it from getting stuck or worse. I’ve you ever seen a computer controlled player running endlessly into a wall its not a bug. It’s a lack of logic. It wasn’t given a way to detect that its stuck or a method to correct itself. This fact is what causes problems as it means even a fairly simple AI can quickly become a mess of spaghetti code.

The problem with this checklist method is that the bigger the checklist grows the more complicated things become. It will quickly end up looking like an overgrown tree instead of a linear path due to all the branches of thought constantly being added. This type of AI is common because its easy to make – but it becomes harder to maintain as the game expands in complexity. It just doesn’t scale well at all. The worst part is that there’s basically nothing you can do about it. There’s no magical way to implement a checklist style AI (usually referred to as a finite state machine) without the resulting spaghetti code. Either throw more code at it and dig your hole deeper or have crap AI.

This is a pseudocode example of a finite state machine. The aforementioned check list! This is actually based on real code that I use for most of the monsters in my games! If you were to convert it into real code then it should work right out of the box. You can already see the branches starting to form despite being such a simple AI. It shoots enemies when they’re present and searches for them when they’re not. That’s it.

Let me give you a test scenario. The AI needs to eat. It will die in a few turns from starvation if it doesn’t! Let’s also say a enemy is nearby. What does the AI do? Does it risk fighting the enemy them before they starve to death or do they run to find food? There’s no guarantee they can quickly defeat the enemy so the obvious answer is to find food. They have a good amount of health left and can tank some damage, after all. However, they don’t know where the food is! They have to randomly explore and hope for the best. They might starve while looking for it or be killed by the pursuing enemy. What if the poor AI is low on health, too? If they run to find food the enemy might kill them. If they fight the enemy it might kill them. If they do either they might starve and die anyway The choice isn’t so easy now, huh? This is one of the many problems with finite state machines. They need a hard coded response to every imaginable scenario and more often than not a clear answer doesn’t exist. Even if a answer does exist then its going to result in predictable agent behavior on top of being annoying to program.

That’s where GOAP comes in. In a way, it’s similar to a finite state machine. It’s not sentient or anything. It still uses the code you made! The difference is that this code is modular. The evil checklist is gone and there’s literally no consequence to making the AI smarter or the game deeper. I can not only give it a response to every feasible situation without the spaghetti code but it will also respond to said situations all on its own. The modules can be thought of as tools and the AI automatically picks the right tool for the job. There’s no such thing as too many tools, either! I can fill that toolbox to the brim without consequence. This is because each of the tools are entirely independent.

The best part is that these tools, being modular, can be added or removed at will. For example, let’s say a civilian, someone that has no experience fighting, just found and picked up a grenade. That grenade contains the code needed for the AI to use it and the act of looting it means the civilian is now capable of throwing it! This is a powerful system that lets the AI better react to its immediate environment. This thing might as well be a procedural chaos generator. Let it loose in a sandbox setting and enjoy!

The way it works is pretty simple. The name goal oriented action programming kind of explains things on its own. Every AI has a few goals and they automatically work to achieve said goals when needed. The need is based on some stats – so a hungry agent will look into a eating food. There’s not a wall of code guiding them, though. Instead, it’s the goal itself helping them. Each of the goals can basically be thought of as miniature finite state machines. They contain just enough code to help.

It does this by analyzing all of the agents options. If the agent is starving and the goal they’ve selected is to eat then every means of acquiring food will be considered. The best option will cost the least points and thus be chosen. If the agent is lost out in some random desert, for example, then there’s not going to be a restaurant anywhere nearby. That means getting fast food will be given an undesirably high cost. It doesn’t just stop their, though. The analysis goes all the way down the list in regards to the option of getting take out. That means it will also take into consideration the cost of buying it. If the agent doesn’t have any money then the cost will be raised even further! The next option could be hunting. There’s some camels nearby! Even though it’s dangerous that would probably end up being the best option available – unless they’re a vegetarian! If that’s the case then they might resort to killing a nearby trader and stealing his cookies.

Phew! That was a wall of text. In the next part I’ll start adding GOAP.

Let’s move on, though. The next step is getting the local maps up and running. These maps are where the majority of real gameplay takes place. The fact that I’m adding them means we’re getting close to actually being able to do stuff. I’m going to start with making the city because it’s going to serve as sort of quest hub. Everything the player does will revolve around it for the time being. I’ll be using the color to terrain method that we used earlier to make the overworld.

Okay, well, here’s the city! The strange appearance is by design. It’s visually stylized after Favela. Lot’s of buildings are tightly crushed together and there’s little more than claustrophobic alleyways between them for movement. This city style is a real hive of scum and villainy. If you want to buy drugs, fence stolen goods, talk to informants or hide from the law then this is the place to go. They’re not entirely safe, though!

Gangs endanger everyone with their senseless territorial warfare, lurking bounty hunters patiently wait in the shadows for their target, undercover operatives search for rebel collaborators hiding among the poor masses and there’s the ever looming threat of yet another alien uprising triggering a deadly military crackdown. The player might be a rebel but that doesn’t mean everyone else is. The Verge aren’t the only bad guys, either. Criminals or just people in general aren’t guaranteed to be your friend. They all have their own goals in life and the rebels are just one faction among a sea of others.

Here are some videos of me walking around the city. The first video is with just fov enabled and the next is with both fov and explored tile memory. The difference in playability is pretty drastic. The memory lets you see where you’ve already been which makes navigating not only easier but less annoying. It’s not really enough, though, is it?

Exploration sounds cool on paper but in reality it usually sucks. I think it would get old pretty fast having to blindly navigate these mazes. The player is going to be visiting a ton of maps and more often than not it will be a place they haven’t been before.

In our world we have all sorts helpful ways of dealing with these problems so it only makes sense for the future to have some modern conveniences too! The first idea that popped into my head are scout drones. The player can buy and deploy them when needed to explore areas on their behalf. I like this idea because it helps tie the player to the world by giving them meaningful reasons to interact with it. If you want some drones you’re gonna have to go make some money and then find someone that sells them!

That’s enough for today, though. In part 4 we’ll start adding some agents!

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I have a super project that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. This idea is actually one of the original reasons I learned how to program in the first place. The problem is that my idea is so complicated that I don’t know where how to begin.

Imagine trying to make something as complex as Dwarf Fortress but on a galactic rather than planetary scale. Then consider I want to individually simulate all the agents, species, factions, and planets so everything that happens in the game is real.

I say real due to a lack of a better word. Dynamically, perhaps? Naturally? I don’t know.

Let me try to explain it with an example.

That contract you see on the black market to recover a stolen item wasn’t generated out of thin air. It was created because a starving citizen stole said item out of desperation. It wasn’t created specifically for you, either. It was generated as a natural consequence of events.

If you don’t do it then someone else will. The game aims for a certain type of realism that can be summed up as things happening for a reason. It’s built on the idea of the butterfly effect. You’re just a cog in the machine of a living breathing world.

If that sounds daunting then you don’t know the half of it. It’s not like I haven’t tried, either!

Every one of my previous attempts has ended for basically the same reason. I put a bunch of work into building something only to realize I’ve barely accomplished anything. The end goal is so far away that no amount of work makes it seem feasible. That’s usually when my inspiration fizzles out until the next wave of motivation hits.

The problem is that it would probably take years of work to establish what I would only refer to as the foundation. The amount of time I would have to spend building this foundation so I can work on the actual fun stuff is what keeps crushing my spirit.

The obvious answer is to build it in baby steps but my question to you is: what’s the first step? Every time I start from what I believe is the bottom-most step I end up realizing there are another thousand floors beneath me. I just can’t get close to the metal.

Anyway, let me try and explain this so-called super project.

I’m going to use Star Wars as an example setting. It sucks, but it’s a setting that just about everyone knows and it can be compared to my idea in a thousand different ways.

The main similarity is that Star Wars has a classic big bad faction vs little good faction. Or, more specifically, the Empire vs the Rebellion. The entirety of my game revolves around this concept. The player is apart of the Rebel Alliance and the goal of the game is to defeat the Empire. That’s not as simple as just crawling through a dungeon and defeating the end boss, though. It will require more than I can even begin to reasonably explain. Imagine how you would go about winning a guerilla war of galactic scale.

Would you bribe politicians to remove laws that harm your movement? Blow up fuel refineries to cripple the Empires fleet movement? Take out generals so enemy forces are without leadership? Free slaves so they join the Rebel Alliance alliance? Sabotage top secret research to delay the release of terrifying new weapons? Steal enemy clothing/documentation so you can sneak into their base to plant false evidence? Lure an enemy patrol into a minefield you recently built? Hack a orbital defense laser to destroy other such lasers so the planet is open to invasion? Befriend distant alien races for unique technology? Pay smugglers to help you escape through an Imperial blockade? Antagonize civilian unrest so they riot in the streets? That commotion sure would make your assault on the capital easier!

The answer is all of the above and then some. The rebs will have to engage is just about every form of espionage imaginable to accomplish their goal. I intend to support as many strategies as possible. If you can think of something then it should be a possibility.

Here’s the problem, though – remember what I said earlier? I want things to be more natural. I don’t want the player walking up to random dudes with quest markers floating over their head telling them where to go and what to do. I want a more realistic setting where there’s no real guidance or obvious gamification. The purpose behind this reasoning will be explained further below. It can be summed up as making your own destiny, though.

Imagine looting a data disk from some high ranking imperial officer you just took out. You weren’t sent to target him specifically or anything. You were just following an encrypted signal that lead you into the forest where him and his crashed ship were waiting. Turns out you were following a distress signal! It could of just as easily been a bandits trap or random noise from a malfunctioning droid. He was shot out of orbit a few hours ago by pirates. They were bested by the officers escort ships but not before they shot his transport down.

These pirates didn’t know about the data disk or anything. They just wanted the treasures his well guarded ship may have contained. The officer didn’t just randomly spawn with it, either. There’s no random loot table non-sense. He was trusted with its transport by his superiors – whom are also as fully simulated as he is!

I’m going to stop the what if shenanigans here as this could go on for awhile. Finding a way to access the data disk and then actually make use of its contents is another couple of paragraphs on its own. The point was to show you the ever expanding web of interactivity that results from even the simplest of things in such a setting. It was also to try showing you the potential depth of a setting where everyone is living their own lives.

You could call all of this random chance but it nevertheless happened on its own. It’s chaos, sure, but it’s automatic chaos. It’s about as close to a living breathing world I can imagine code being.

It wasn’t something I specifically programmed to happen. I didn’t spawn the pirates. They were poor civilians that turned to piracy as a means to an end. I didn’t tell them to attack the officer. They needed money and knew a guarded transport might contain riches. I didn’t give the officer a top secret data disk full of information. He was trusted by his superiors due to outstanding performance. I didn’t lure you towards the officer with that signal. You just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I think that’s great and it’s the underlying basis for the whole game. This concept is the meat and potatoes of my super project and it extends to everything.

I’ll basically create the initial universe and then let things go off the rails on their own. The cool thing is that this simulation happens in a live setting. There’s no history to pregenerate. You help shape history by being apart of it rather than just living in the afterglow. I just spawn the planets, factions and other necessary set pieces and let the AI take care of everything else. They’ll all just start living their little silly lives and chaos will unfold by itself.

Is it worth it, though? I think so. The potential for story really interests me. This system gets around the constraints of being a person. There’s only so much content I can add and my creativity is limited. I’d rather make a chaos generator than code a thousand missions or random events by hand. I think the end result would be better.

I think the reason for my obsession with this idea is that a lot of sandbox games feel empty. If you play them long enough you realize a lot of stuff is being faked behind the scenes. That fleet you just destroyed, for example, doesn’t really matter. The game will just replace it with another one when you leave. In my ideal game it would matter. Their would be consequences instead of illusions. The Empire would have to spend resources to rebuild it. That means time, money, metals, labor. Their would be a whole production chain going on that you can interrupt at any level. If implemented properly you’d be able to not only do some genuine espionage but also experience the consequences of your actions! For example, if you keep raiding those ore mines then Imperial ship production will genuinely slow down.

That brings me to my final point of the day: consequences. This is where a lot of games that do what I’m trying to do end up falling short. They create this elaborate background system but fail to make the player adequately aware of it. Thus, everything they see or interact with might as well be random. To get around this problem I’ll be doing a lot of work to help reveal the worlds complexity to the player. I could add graphs so the player can see the long and short term effects of their actions or individual unit history logs so they can see what others have been up to. I think that kind of stuff would go a long way to helping players realize the richness of the setting and their impact upon it. There’s no point having an interconnected universe when you can’t examine the connections.

That’s all for today. This wall of text was several hours in the making. I should probably spent my time coding instead of talking but sharing my ideas helps motivate me. I don’t know what we’ll be talking about next. I might start going into detail about how I’ll be actually implementing this or just talk about more abstract stuff that only makes sense to me. Who knows?

If I do any actual coding progress I’ll be sure to let you know. I intend to document the process with videos because the idea of having its creation history on record from start to finish interests me.

Continued in part 2.