A little while ago I sat down with Ogre and started work on a game idea I had. The game started off as a simple harvest moon clone with a more dynamic, evolving AI. I had plans to include a growing city, very dynamic and alive npcs, and of course lots of farming fun. I worked on the game about 2 months, starting over at least two times during that time period while I got used to using Ogre. I finally hit a road block last month, after creating a basic framework to wrap Ogre I set out to write an object system. Which is where I am still sitting at.
During this lull of programming I stumbled across a new idea while thinking of character designs. I watch several different animes, some of my favorites are Bleach, Azumanga Daioh, Shakugan no Shana, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It was while watching the last anime on that list that I had an idea, I really like Haruhi because she is such a character. Like Midna in Zelda, Haruhi just emanates personality. So the idea I had was to model the characters in the game after these anime characters, equipped with the same personality and actions.
Obviously this idea once again only added to my work load, making npc’s that can act on their own, maybe even talk on their own, according to nothing but personality data is no small feat. It has probably never been fully realized yet in any game. However after some research I found an interesting article about MBTI and I thought that a good way to accomplish this would be to program npc’s with functions that govern how they think about the world. Most games program reactions to simulate personalities. What I want to do is program npc’s to form personalities based on how they perceive the world.
For instance, if an npc is introverted, most of the time he will look to the introverted module for his next move. Npc’s will have a load out of percentages they are for each of the four types. The program will run both modules to figure out what to do, but weigh the options against their percentage for that type.
I will write more about this later when the idea is more developed, right now I want to also mention a video I saw talking about a special neural network.
This network operated as a pair of connected networks, one network is full of noise (random inputs), and the other network takes that noise as input and judges the good from the bad. The idea here is that in a real human brain we are subject to noise, random thoughts or just subliminal noise, which we then judge to be a good idea or not. I no longer have any link to this video, but I still remember how it was designed and implemented. I thought maybe this would be a good way to use the MBTI, have a global brain that produces ideas and have the MBTI modules think about how to handle them.
Of course I also worry about the playability of this game, and if I am expecting about a dozen or so npc’s on the screen at once, running 12 brains this way might be a bit over burdening. But of course I want to make a demo application some time in the future to see.
It is these two systems (objects and AI) that will be the main design goals in my project.
