# 010 – Unused Features

As with any project there are many things that go wrong or just don’t make it into the project, whether it was not working to a high enough quality, or whether just plain broken, today I’ll discuss two major features left out of Zombieeub53! A* Pathfinding This was very close to working, but it lacked […]

# 009 – Directing The Action

There are a vast amount of other application for AI that are not just what the player notices, such as NPC’s but behind the scenes AI such as systems that generate content or AI that controls the game flow – most notably in the case of Valve’s “Left 4 Dead” game where an AI director […]

#008 – Zombie Configuration

Artificial Stupidity Artificial stupidity is where the AI has been given limitations in order to give a more realistic behavioural pattern to an agent – so that our zombies are not omnipotent ever present deities – in ways such as limiting their movement ability, or making them pause before making a decision. Implementing To implement […]

#007. Steering Behaviours II

There has been some additional steering behaviours added to the Zombies in Zombieeub53, namely: pursuit, arrive and avoid. In this entry we shall look at these new steering behaviours. Pursuit Pursuit behaviour is in a sense the seek behaviour but with the addition of guessing where the target entity will be in x amount of […]

# 006. Welcome to the neighbourhood.

In this post we will discuss a neighbourhood search algorithm. A neighbourhood search algorithm is one that allows an object to check neighbouring objects only, rather than performing checks on every object in the game – for example, in a game with 500 map tiles and 200 zombies that would be 140,000 checks per frame […]

# 005 – Sound, Sight, Messages

The basic zombie in Zombieeub53 has a limited intelligence, but it can perceive it’s environment through sight and sound. Sight Detection Each zombie has a field of view and a viewing range, which defines a cone beginning at the zombie’s centre. The sight detection algorithm takes a vector from the cone origin to the target […]

# 004 – Give A Zombie A Brain!

In this update I will discuss another important aspect of the AI for Zombieeub53 – Finite State Machines (FSM) Agents like our zombies need to be able to make decisions and set goals, often times varying their goals depending on the current state of the environment, or their own state – and be able to […]

#003 – Collision Detection & Steering Behaviour

A change to the design. After much thought on the current direction of the game I have decided to make two major changes to the design plan on Zombieeub53: Removal of humans The humans were planned to be added to have an extra layer of AI showcasing, having different goals and behaviours to the zombies […]

#002 -Deeper Design Notes

Take a deeper look at some of the design ideas for the game and a view of what the next week will bring.

#001 – It’s Alive!

Design overview for Zombieeub53, a 2D top-down, twin-stick shooter.