1.1 My Game Idea

My Game Idea

The software I will be using to create my game will be Unity - Game Engine, "Unity Technologies offers a platform for creating beautiful and engaging 2D, 3D, VR, and AR games and apps. A powerful graphics engine and full-featured editor enable you to realize your creative vision fast, and deliver your content to virtually any media or device. You can easily connect to your audiences on PCs, consoles, the web, mobile devices, home entertainment systems, embedded systems, or head-mounted displays."(1) Unity is a massively used product in industry around the world, over 34% of the worlds top games are made using the Unity - Game Engine. PlayStation, Apple IOS, Android, Microsoft are just some of the many platforms Unity supports, because of its world known name and mass use in the industry today, I have chosen to use Unity as my platform for creating my game, I feel it is important to learn how Unity works and gain experience using one of the worlds most used engines.

So my game... My idea is to have a very basic layout of lets say two rooms, my player character will start in room A and I will have a zombie AI character in room B. The goal is so that the zombie character will first walk around room B on a patrol walking between two points in the room and as the player character then enters the room B, the zombie will then trigger, chase down and kill the player character. Below is my layout of the game and how I want it to look:

So as you can see from my floor plan that the player character will start in room A and head towards room B, room B is being guarded by two zombie AI's which is currently patrolling between two points. When the player character enters room B the AI's vision path will detect the player character, chase him down and kill him. 

The elements of gaming AI I will be using to make this game with be that of algorithm (Using AI in Computer Games - Assignment 1, 1.1 Algorithms), because I am setting the AI character's basic rules to follow. By telling them to walk between two points and then hunt down the player character and kill him when noticed in game triggering an instance, simple commands telling the AI what to do. I will also be linking this to a hack algorithm (Using AI in Computer Games - Assignment 1, 1.3 Hacks) in gaming AI, in this instance the hack will be applied to both zombie AI's because the code will be the same, the code is so basic that the player character will know what the zombies will do even before it has happened.

Another element applied will be that of tactics and strategy, (Using AI in Computer Games - Assignment 1, 5.1 Tactics & Strategy's) now there will not be much but the zombie AI's will have a strategy which will be to surround and attack the player character. 

State Machine will be used in my game to refer to the state of the zombie AI's (Using AI in Computer Games - Assignment 1, 4.1 State Machines) this could be either evade, attack, wander an find aid, the two I will be covering will be wander and attack, two very important elements which will be linked in my game.

The final element is a pathfinding concept, the A* heuristic cost function algorithm will be used in the zombie AI. The reason the A* will be used is because Dijkstra can find the most ideal paths from one node to all other nodes on the graph, but A* finds only one good path between two nodes. And that is what I'm looking for, there will only be one objective for the zombie which will be to walk between two points and the attack the player character.

So there we go, I now have my game idea, what engine I will be working in, the layout for the game and finally the algorithm elements that I will be using to make the game work. In the next 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 I will be discussing the three elements used in greater detail. In section 2 I will be covering the other elements used in AI in gaming and see how I could or could have applied them into my game along with how they are used in the games we play today.