Artificial Sentience

So I've been pondering something in game design for a while now. Many games have ai that's realistic, that's sort of thinks and strategizes on its own, but not many games truly create real, thinking creatures from their ai.

I've been pondering how I, a humble flash game developer might be able to create a computer controlled being that is capable of making its own choices, a truly free willed artificial creature. A creature that, rather than having its only purpose be to strategize to kill Master Chief, decides of its own whether or not it wants to kill Master Chief.

Thus is born my project Artificial Sentience

I suggest reading from the bottom up if you take the time.


This is basically me trying to transcribe my thoughts and attempts at creating more realistic characters in my art form. I think, as an artist, and as a human being, I have something to learn about myself though creating these things. Thus, also, I think other people might learn from the experience too.

So, there it is. Shameless self promotion. I hope you don't take it that way though. This is me trying to discover something new (and hoping someone hasn't already done something like this and I'm just behind the times)



I don't know if anyone finds this interesting or not, sorry if this is a bit spammy.

NOTE: If you seen this post before somewhere else, it's probably because I've posted pretty much the exact same thing there too. Not trying to get hits or anything, I'm just tired of typing for today.

I agree that many games out there, let alone Flash games (there is only 1 or 2 that come to mind that barely touch on 'smart' AI), don't utilise very 'creative/realistic' AI, and it's something that can really create so much more depth and re-play value to a game.

One of the games on my 'to make list' (which is getting increasingly bloated :p) has been planned around bringing new concepts (or at least, for Flash games) to that genre. It's a side-scrolling shooter which lately has become too typical and bland, imho), which along with many other elements that encourage players making their own decisions to approach situations, would contain emotion-based AI. In other words, each bad guy is given certain characteristics which controls their behaviour and can be instantly changed based on it's current environment/surroundings.
eg. bad guy#1 starts in 'sentry' mode, so it will cautiously patrol it's position. The player runs towards bad guy#1's position, but remains out of his field of view. bad guy#1 is within range to hear the noise created by player running, and switches to 'alert' mode, stops, alerts any other nearby allies of direction of noise, and either stops and waits for further action or walks towards the direction of the noise. If bad guy#1 has a high courage characteristic, he would choose the later option, but he doesn't and instead calls over his nearby ally which happens to have a 'captain' status. The presence of the captain increases all other surrounding 'normal' guys (such as badguy#1) characteristics and as a result, they both have enough courage to move to the players position.

Sorry for that rant, but I guess that explains how it could be different for the player each time depending on the style of play they choose- if they chose to walk instead of run, they could've stabbed the normal guy from behind, or run out there and taken him out before he becomes alerted, or alert him on purpose and trap the enemy in a strategic position, etc...

As you can see, my ideas are pretty straightforward and basic emotions for a typical game, but I'm sure you've planned to use you're AI system to create environments and game concepts unknown to the Flash platform. I'll be very interested to see how your attempts at such a task turn out, and I wish you the best of luck to create something unexpected and amazing!

Viza

I once made this very simple battlefield for people who were claimimg to have ideas on AI scripting, but it turned out that the number of those who could actually do what they say is pretty small (like 2 or 3 persons out of 91 unique hits so far). So the point is, let me see your idea in action. You had a time to say lots of words in english on subject, so surely you have a time to say few words in programming language?

Interesting ideas Viza, a game that's unique everytime in that complex of a manner certainly holds replay value somewhere along the line.

And realMakc, I understand your doubting me, in fact, I understand if all of Flash Kit doubts that I could pull this off, to be honest, I'm not that great of a programmer. Suffice to say I'm not up to snuff against some of the gurus we have on here. The very nature of my project, however, is slow. Not really something I could go to a site, enter some code, and leave. This process will be very much a learning experience for me as it could be for anyone else; I'm certainly claiming no mastership of this subject. You might note though that I have already uploaded the code to the site that I have so far, and I plan to upload it again every time I make a major enough change.

You want to see my idea in action? So would I. Which is part of the reason I made this blog, to keep me on task as well as let other see my progress. I don't expect this process to be instant, however, like all good things, it takes time.