As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t like game design. I like to mod other people’s games much more. That’s what got me into game development in the first place, the love of modding or taking other people’s concepts in a different direction.
It’s probably one of the reasons I enjoy debugging so much (and hence, multithreading is so fun for me to work on).
One of the areas I desperately want to improve the computer players on has to do with spell casting. Ideally, I’d like it all data driven in XML and then tweaked with Python. But in the nearer term, I just want to make the computer players play Elemental extremely well. And that means, looking at the kinds of things that the computer players can easily access:
There are a lot of interesting APIs available to the AI to look at spells. But like Cypher in “The Matrix”, I prefer to look at all the data at once and see what strikes me as useful.
I know, as a human that Arcane Weaponry is useful. But what kinds of things can I access in this spell that will indicate that it’s useful to the AI and how it might best be used?
As you’ve probably gathered, there’s a lot of subjectivity involved. An author bias. As I get better at the game, read the forums, etc. I can incorporate these experiences into biasing the AI in certain directions.
