I had a wonderful plan and then hit a snag.

All along I had been expecting to use CAAT’s path-following for the enemy AI. I was going to define paths based on the GA chromosome string that would be like a ‘signature attack’ for each enemy that would cross-breed. This morning I found out that the paths are defined in absolute terms, not relative, so I can’t just define a path giving the general direction, but instead have to calculate the general direction each time. I was also facing complexity of how to represent the path, path types (linear, cubic, quadratic), and how to ensure the randomly generated path variables would work.

So I gave up on the paths and headed into the wonderful world of steering AI. Now I’m thinking that there will be multiple behavior types (seek, pursue, evade) and the type will be baked into the chromosome. This should work.

The deadline is looming and I still don’t have cross-breeding or, you know, a real game. I’m starting to get worried.

On the flipside, looking through the blog posts on LudumDare.com/compo shows that the theme has a lot of folks going the Artificial Life route. That’s awesome! I hope those folks aren’t discouraged. Not many AL-based games aren’t really that fun. Did anyone ever ‘play’ Creatures?