I’ve been thinking about a vague concept for a game lately. Also been playing a bit of Diablo 2 again, so that’s influenced the design a bit. Also listening to the D&D Penny-Arcade podcasts, which sound very interesting and fun to play.
The general idea is a mix between Oblivion and Diablo 2. Already this sounds like high hopes. Anyway, some ideas are nailed down. The view will be 3rd person behind-the-player (sort of like Oblivion) but contain the fast paced hack-n-slash of Diablo. Similar to Dynasty Warriors I suppose.
The next idea is using AI for the bots/monsters based on RL (Reinforcement Learning). Hard to say exactly how this’ll work as the details have slipped from my mind. Maybe I’ll remember them later.
Like Oblivion, the world will be open, unlike Diablo which is often constrained.
Another half-idea is taking some inspiration from Fable, by allowing the player to use whatever skills he/she wants and the player will appear and move differently accordingly. So if the player fights with a big-ass hammer all the time, upper body muscle will increase greatly. If using spells, the stains of magic may affect the player’s hands and body.
The most ambitious part is letting the player create magicks and items using their imaginations and letting the game take care of the details. Hell, this is getting a bit Spore-ish now. In order to do these things, some sort of backbones are needed for the ingredients to the magicks/items.
It’s a very vague idea at the moment, but I would like to think more upon it and maybe implement parts of it over time.
Edit: Hah! I remembered part of the RL AI. The bots could be run using pain/pleasure reward orientated AI. So each bot will have certain pain receptors on their body (e.g. body parts, ‘emotion’, wetness (no-one likes being wet), temperature, general discomfort I suppose).
Refactoring that statement, the pain scale could go (from worst to best):
Extreme pain (broken bone) ——– Mild pain (open wound) ——— Mild discomfort (cold) ——– Comfortable (warm bed) ——– Pleasure (having fun) ——– Extreme pleasure (high ecstasy)
Using this sort of scale, the AI could map actions and learn (using good ol’ RL) to what is good and what isn’t. Of course, this scale need only be half the size and only mapped by pain. Pleasure would simply be avoiding or not in pain. For instance, the bot walks in the water and feels discomfort. This action of being in water will be associated with discomfort.
I’m not so naive to believe that it will instantly recognise water as the bad thing (it will have to take in a multitude of factors, using all 5 (or more) senses). But it will at least slightly associate submersion in water with discomfort.
This AI is somewhat separate from the game idea itself, but it could be used in general purpose terms.
See Learning Movement for another possible idea.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Game Idea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.