Igor, fetch me a brain!

We’ve reached the point that we need to start getting some monsters into the game, which brings up an interesting question: how should they behave? How smart should they be? What are their goals, if any? In the story the monsters are all trying to get the egg, but does this mean that they should all try to move towards the egg in game? It seems like it would have to be more complicated than that to be interesting (All monsters moving towards the egg is really predictable).

I’ve been hesitant about moving forward with a highly predatory AI because I’m nervous about it becoming a huge time sink that will take away from other aspects of the game. While I personally have faith in the ability of dumb enemies to create interesting situations, Ryan wants the enemies to hunt you or the egg down to raise tension.

I’m trying to find the sweet spot on the spectrum of dumb enemies that know nothing of their surroundings to highly situational enemies that know where everything is in the world and act appropriately. We need to make the enemies feel right without sinking a month of programming into the problem.

What I want to do is create enemy AI that is mostly dumb, but with some limited reactions to the player and egg to make them feel a little more predatory and threatening. For instance, we’ve talked about having a monster that just circles a platform, but will jump off towards the player when they get too close (or simply drop if the player is right below them).