- 15 Jul 2016
Continuing in my never-ending project to make a “simple” roguelike in C++, I decided to tackle something I have never before tried: artificial intelligence. My first rough idea was to implement some sort of component-type system, and build the AI up like I built up entities. This turned out to be far too complicated, and even getting a monster to move randomly was a chore. Obviously, this wasn’t going to work.
After browsing /r/roguelikedev and RogueBasin I came across a few articles on “need driven AI” - an absurdly cool concept, and so (seemingly) simple to implement I wasn’t sure how I didn’t stumble across this earlier. Basically, creatures in the game assign a value to things they know about (treasure, the player, exits, other monsters they are friendly with, other monsters they are terrified of, etc. etc.) and make an ‘informed’ decision about where to move next. A monster could desire killing the player over treasure, and would “decide” to move towards the player instead of a closer pile of gold.
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