We are continuing our work on the behavior system for the NPC's in Adventure craft so that the game world will be rich with life and emergent gameplay! As you learn the relationships between the game's NPC's you will be able to use this knowledge to your advantage. I decided to create a war between the green mushroom men and the red mushroom men to test out creating conflicts between character races.
So I created these little green mushroom guys and armed them with some shotgun bazooka type weapons!
I set them to have a generally neutral disposition, but to defend themselves if attacked. I also set their behavior to attack red mushrooms on sight.
The red mushroom men are set to attack anything that they come across. So they run around being a general nuisance, killing wildlife and attacking the player, but they will prioritize the green mushroom men if they see them first. And thus the mushroom wars are born! In the picture above those two red mushroom men were after me and the green mushroom man is rushing over to defend me! What a guy!
So now if you are in the mushroom forest you can seek shelter near a green mushroom man house if there are a lot of red mushroom men in the area and they will protect you. Also you can get the red mushroom men to chase you to a green encampment, to start up a battle.
But if you betray their trust by attacking them they will attack you!
I'm also working on some enemies that can move underground and pop up to attack the player. These sand worms are a good example.
Killed by my own creation!
Thanks for reading! Any feedback that you would like to leave in the comment section below is appreciated. If you wanna ask me anything about Adventure Craft or just want to say hello, you can follow me on Twitter @iENDERi I post updates there regularly and love talking to people about gaming and game development!
Wonderful! I like the structure of the reactions and the different preferences/priorities in the behaviour of creatures (I only remember a similar thing from Gothic 2: When a wolf tried to hunt you down, you could lure him to a sheep flock - because he prefers a tasty sheep over human meat, he gave up his pursuit and attacked the sheep). It's great to be able to manipulate the inhabitants of the gameworld in such a way and it makes the whole experience authentic. I'm looking forward to my own social-engineering experiments! ;)
And the sand worm looks really crude and brutal! I'm already feeling moments of panic. ;)
Thanks! Each time I play the game a new behavior pops up into my head for stuff that we can add to a characters personality/brain. We plan to continue to expand the system throughout the development of the game even after it is released. I hope to create a system very rich with possibility like they did with Dwarf Fortress. I want people to say "Man I was playing Adventure Craft last night and you won't believe what happened..."