Stay Alive: Apocalypse - Artificial Intelligence
Games with static maps and hex grid, uses navigation helpers of the game engine and built in pathfinder systems. If your map is not a static one and you are developing a game with a sandbox automatic generated map, you can't use those systems unfortunately. (Like you can't use lightmapping and OC). Stay Alive: Apocalypse map changes in every new game. In such a map, you need to code an AI system that enables dozens of Zombies and NPC's to take decisions, to move and to follow without imposing a load on your CPU. This is the distinctive feature of Stay Alive: Apocalypse, this is what makes us different from the other games. An AI can move inside complicated corridors, streets and apartments without a problem..
AI doesn't mean to make the NPC's move or follow only. AI must take decisions, perform that decisions and interact with you. We tried to do this extremely realistic in Stay Alive: Apocalypse. Just like in real life, an NPC may not like you in the first meeting or may not trust you. And also this NPC may seem and behave nice to you but may have a sneaky plan about you. The NPC's in our game will interact with you like this. According to your interaction with the NPC's, you may have more detailed options to interact with them or less options. You can give commands to them, you can chat with them, you can play games with them and even you can threat them and get all of the items that they have. But beware, they can do the same to you.
Every NPC is generated with a characteristic tree, based on the NPC's basic features and skills. For example a coward NPC would be the one who escapes first during an attack. You would not want to lose a weapon by giving a weapon to such a character. But "bully" and "psycho" characters would love to attack zombies and the attackers to you and your group. Self-Seeker characters would not like to share their items with you for example. Interaction with friendly characters would be a lot more easy than the other characteristics. If you want to learn about the characteristics of the NPC's, they should be in your survival group or you should have a high "judge of character" skill.
The traits, stats and skills of the NPC's have a huge impact on what they do. You can see an NPC character running around, strengthening the doors and windows of your house. You can see some other NPC's looting around and putting on the armors and the weapons that they found to be stronger. We don't want our NPC Interaction be like "find, kill and loot" just like in the most of the other games. Let's be realistic, Would we kill the survivors if there are thousands of zombies inside the city that we are living? Of course not. We would like to be more and more crowded to fight the apocalypse. And if you lockpick the shelters and the houses of the other NPC's and survivor groups, you lose karma. If you steal their items, if you try to threaten them, you lose karma. A karma loss of your character drops your stealth, defence and interatcion skills which makes the game a lot more harder for you. With this Karma feature, we want our players to be more cooperative with the NPC, not cruel ones.
NPC's like gifts. You can make them like you and even make them join you by giving gifts to them. And you can also make them your captive and prisoner too. But like we said before, they can do the same to you. You can be a group leader and a group member, you can have a wife/husband/partner and captives. Leaders can give orders to the group members and do what they want. Couples have this too. But if you are in a survivor group with your wife or husband, you will take care of each other first, then the group leader. Captives do the orders given by you, but they can't gather items around. They get and consume what you give them.
There are main quests about the story, job quests, tendency quests, random wish quests and NPC quests in our game. You can get quests from NPC's to get in well with them. By succeeding this NPC quests you get their trust and love. But some of them may be really hard for you to complete.
NPC's take their decisions instantly. For example an NPC behaving like a death machine and killing zombies and protecting you, may flee if he/she runs out of ammo. Or maybe continue attacking with another weapon if he/she finds one.
This is all we can say aboout the AI for now. We are improving and updating our AI system day by day. We are planning to present the best apocalyptic experience to you.
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