Pulsaro

Game AI Brainstorm

Morten — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:51:08 +0000

We had a brainstorm on how we’d like the main AI to behave. This is just for the main AI “foot trooper” and not for bosses and special enemies.

Game AI Idle.

The AI has no priorities. It just stands there waiting, looking for a target!

Game AI Roam.

In this state the AI has no specific purpose, it randomly walks around the map, looking for a target, scanning the environment it passes.

Game AI Patrol.

It has a specific patrol-cycle that is walks, looking for the hero.

Game AI Guard.

The AI guards a specific area, building, asset etc. It will never get too far away from this area as its orders are with all means necessary to protect and keep the hero from getting the item/asset or passing the area.

Game AI Attack.

As soon as the AI detects a target, it changes state to the attack state. In the attack state it evaluates its attack-options, calculates the distance to the target, etc. and goes for it, guns blazing.

Game AI Retreat to Healing Station.

If the level contains a Healing station, the AI is able to retreat to charge up and return to the hot zone with full health and ready for a fresh new battle with the hero.

Game AI Flee.

If the situation is getting serious, the AI is taking many hits and damage over a short period of time can result in the AI panicking and fleeing from the hot zone. No direction is specified when it’s in panic-mode – it just wants to get away, no matter where!

Concept drawing – Enemy AI

Emil — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:58:49 +0000

This is a concept drawing of the first enemy you’ll encounter in the game.

The inspiration comes from trash sci-fi and James Bond movies like Moon Raker – films where you’d expect to find badguys wearing jumpsuits. We liked the idea of jumpsuit-clad enemies so much that there are now three different types of enemies in differently coloured jumpsuits. The plan is to have the colour of their suit say something about their function, so that the player can instantly read what kind of a threat an enemy signifies.

We needed a symbol for their evil empire, and it had to be easily read and something you’d quickly associate with evil. An x or a cross as a symbol for an evil empire is both silly enough for the story of this game and close enough to a swastika that I think people will recognize it as evil without further explaining needed.

Game Features

Morten — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:05:49 +0000

We had a brainstorm on features we’d like to see in the game, here are some of our ideas.

Clone Machine.
Healing Station.
Pickups.
Personal mine.
Crab-mine.
Hand grenades.
Weapons

Assault rifle.
Shotgun.
Bazooka.

Highscore.

Clone Machine:

One way enemy AIs can be instantiated into the game world is through a clone-machine, the idea being that it is constantly cloning more pure-evil AI enemies into the level until a certain criteria has been met. It’s also a convenient way of having a limited number of character models making sense and at the same time creating a narrative around this limitation.

Healing Station:

When the AI is in a fight with our Hero and takes damage, they can make a decision to stay and fight to the death or retreat to a nearby healing station to get reloaded and ready for action. We are also talking about having AI’s flee in terror if the situation is critical.

Crab-mine:

When dropping a crab-mine, the mine will wait for a target to get within range, at which point it wakes up, moves towards its target and explodes for massive damage, much like a real enemy crab.

Introduction to our Hero

Emil — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:40:20 +0000

This is the concept for our main character – a parody on your average action-game protagonist; macho, stupid, authoritarian and dangerous. When we started out throwing ideas around about the game, we didn’t know if it was more useful to start making up a world and let that shape its characters or the other way around, which we ended up doing. We settled on this Hanna-Barbera look, with hard angles and pastel colors that you see above. Both because its a timeless art style that we look up to and because we simply don’t have the capacity to create hyper-realistic graphics within a reasonable amount of time, being a two-man-band. We at least assume it being much more time-consuming to create high definition realism than something more akin to Roadrunner or Ren and Stimpy.

One of the first things I did after the initial concept work, was to create this palette to make sure there’s always a clear direction in the graphics. It’s a warm and somewhat muted pastel-inspired palette, that I hope will work towards our goal. We’ll see!

Our first game

Morten — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:42:02 +0000

We have started work on our first game. We are at the very earliest of stages yet, prototyping and toying with ideas and concepts. Since this is our first game we are focused on keeping the game mechanics simple and clean. So obviously the game will be a classic arcade arena shooter in the spirit of Chaos Engine, or more recently Pineapple Smash Crew, with added tower defense mechanics, set in a Hanna-Barbera-inspired 3D world.

You control the Hero and you must kill all the evil Enemy Clones in your path!

We are really looking forward to keeping you up to date with our progress! You can look forward to much more information in the coming weeks, so please check back soon and remember to post a comment below – we’ll do our best to answer all your inquiries!